Scientific potential of the Indo-Belgian 3.6-m DOT in the field of Galactic Astronomy

Abstract

India and Belgium have jointly established two 4-meter class optical telescopes at Devasthal located in Nainital, India. After successful installation of the 3.6-m modern new technology Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) in 2015, it was technically activated by premiers of both countries from Brussels on March 30, 2016. Since then, the 3.6-m DOT has been used for both optical and near-Infrared (NIR) observations for a number of research proposals. The best angular resolution achieved is 0″.4 indicating that the optics of the 3.6-m DOT is good and capable of providing images of celestial bodies with sub-arc-second resolution. The observations provide proof that the care taken in the construction of the telescope dome building has paid a rich dividend as their thermal mass is so low that it has not degraded the natural atmospheric seeing at Devasthal measured about two decades ago during 1997 to 1999 using differential image motion monitor. A few preliminary scientific results obtained from recent observations are presented along with performance and global potential of the 3.6-m DOT in the field of galactic astronomy. The 3.6-m DOT is capable of providing internationally competitive science once high resolution spectrograph and other planned modern back-end instruments become operational. Geographical location of the observatory has global importance for time domain and multi-wavelength astrophysical studies.

Optical Telescopes at Devasthal Observatory, Nainital

“…They also indicate that performance of the telescope is at par with its peers located elsewhere in the world (Omar et al 2017;Kumar et al 2018;Sagar et al 2019Sagar et al , 2020. Consequently, the facilities at Devasthal have led a good number of national and international collaborations including the Indo-Belgian techno-scientific collaboration termed BINA (Joshi and De Cat 2019;Sagar 2023). TIFR contribution in TANSPEC and TIRCAM2 NIR instruments is an excellent example of intra-national collaboration (Sharma et al 2022a, b;2023 and references therein).…”