MSV-2035 Astronomy Document - Inside Design - FINAL - FINAL

Astronomy & Astrophysics 29 world- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and Canadian SpaceAgency (CSA) is an observatory class space telescope launched in December 2021. The 6.5-meter diameter of the primary mirror of JWST, composed of 18 hexagonal mirror segments, makes it the largest space telescope ever built. The JWST operates in the wavelength range from visible to mid-infrared (0.6 - 28.3 μ m) . The unprecedented infrared sensitivity of JWST will play a pivotal role to address some of the outstanding questions in fields of astronomy and cosmology. The three main instruments aboard JWST are NIRCamNear InfraRed Camera), NIRSpec (Near InfraRed Spectrograph), and MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument). The primary science objectives of JWST include understanding the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies, birth of stars and planets, and study of bio-signatures in exoplanets. While India is not a partner in this space telescope project, Indian astronomers will be able to apply for observing time through competitive open proposals. 3.2 Radio At present, there are many radio telescopes covering different parts of the radio frequency spectrum and different aspects of radio astronomy: large single dish observatories such as Parkes inAustralia, Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in USA, Effelsberg in Germany, Sardinia in Italy, and the 500-meterAperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China, as well as array instruments such as the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia, LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) in Europe, Ooty radio telescope (ORT) and GMRT in India, MeerKAT in South Africa, VLA (Very Large Array) and LWA (LongWavelengthArray) in USA, CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) in Canada, ALMA(Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeterArray) in Chile. Furthermore, there are very long baseline array telescopes – combinations of individual observatories over continental and inter-continental scales that are operated in a coordinated manner to achieve super high resolution for specific studies e.g. the VLBA (Very Large Baseline Array in USA), the European VLBI network (EVN), the East Asian VLBI network, and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). This concept has also been extended to use space based radio observatories (e.g. RadioAstron space VLBI mission) working in tandem with the ground based ones to achieve some of the highest spatial resolutions in radio astronomy. This compendium of facilities enables astronomers to obtain a fairly powerful, detailed and comprehensive view of the Universe, especially when used in conjunction with facilities in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrumas well as in other regimes such as gravitational wave astronomy. In addition, special radio astronomy observatories such as Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) and Askaryan RadioArray (ARA) are also being used to observe ultra-high energy neutrinos and cosmic rays. These probe the highest energy phenomena taking place in the Universe and also present an opportunity to study fundamental physics at energies much higher than currently possible in laboratory accelerators. The above mentioned telescopes are used to study continuum and spectral line emission from distant sources. In particular, radio continuum emission from stars, compact objects, AGN, galaxies, galaxy clusters and transients are regularly used to derive physical conditions in these objects. Spectral line studies (using H I 21-cm line or molecular line) are useful to measure redshift of the sources, place constraints on variation of fundamental constants, and extract physical conditions prevailing in these sources. Observed rotation and dispersion measures, and absorption line signatures are used to study the nature of intervening gas. Some of the above mentioned telescopes have been used to MEGA SCIENCE VISION-2035