science · Operational
AstroSat
India's first dedicated astronomy observatory, and one of very few able to observe the same object in ultraviolet, visible and X-ray simultaneously.
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Most observatories look at the sky in one part of the spectrum. AstroSat carries five instruments spanning far ultraviolet to hard X-rays, and can point all of them at the same target at once. For objects that vary on timescales of seconds (accreting black holes, magnetars, X-ray binaries), simultaneity is the whole experiment.
Ten years on, the observatory is still operating and still producing results, including the detection of quasi-periodic oscillations that constrain how matter behaves in the last stable orbit before a black hole’s event horizon.