GROWTH India

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GROWTH-India team and international collaborators have found a rare jetted Tidal Disruption Event - the furthest one ever seen! More details here.

GROWTH India

GROWTH-India is India's first fully robotic optical research telescope. This was constructed as a joint partnership between the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, with support from DST-SERB and IUSSTF. Current operations benefit from the generous support of the IIT Bombay alumni batch of 1994. The primary research focus of this telescope is time-domain astronomy: the study of explosive transients and variable sources in the universe.

We are a part of the international GROWTH network: a Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen. Together with various partners around the world, we can continuously monitor any interesting object in the sky - uninterrupted by daylight !

Science

The GROWTH-India project was set up with a few key science goals, with a focus on time-domain astrophysics. Observations and research on these topics is carried out by the GROWTH-India team based at IIT Bombay and IIA.

Fast transients (electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources, gamma ray bursts, fast radio bursts, fast blue optical transients, etc.)
Supernovae and Novae
Solar system objects (Near Earth Asteroids, Active Asteroids, Outbursting Comets, etc.)
Education (Courses, workshops, student training, etc.)

India's First Fully Robotic Telescope

To accomplish the primary science goals, we need a telescope that can start observations within the first 24 hours of the discovery of a transient event. The precise positions of these new sources are often unknown, hence we need a wide field of view for imaging them.

The GROWTH-India telescope has a 0.7 x 0.7 degrees field of view, and a pixel scale of 0.7 arcseconds per pixel. The telescope will generate more than one thousand gigabytes of data each year.

Telescope

Aperture: 70 cm, F/6.5
Mounting: Altitude-Azimuth
Make and model: Planewave Instruments CDK700

Camera

Type: Back-illuminated CCD
Size: 4096 x 4108 pixels, 15 microns
Cooling: Thermo-electric
Make and model: Andor iKon-XL
SDSS ugriz prime filters

Site

The telescope is located at the Indian Astronomical Observatory site at Hanle, Ladakh. Situated at 4500 meters above mean sea level, this is one of the highest observatory sites in the world and one of the best telescope locations in the country.

The GROWTH-India telescope joins The Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT), the gamma-ray array telescope (HAGAR), and the imaging Cherenkov telescope (MACE) at this site.

Acknowledgements

The GROWTH India Telescope (GIT) is a 70-cm telescope with a 0.7-degree field of view, set up by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) with funding from Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and the Science and Engineering Research Board, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. It is located at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (Hanle), operated by IIA. We acknowledge funding by the IITB alumni batch of 1994, which partially supports operations of the telescope. Telescope technical details are available at https://sites.google.com/view/growthindia/.

The GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project is funded by the National Science Foundation under PIRE Grant No 1545949. GROWTH is a collaborative project among California Institute of Technology (USA), University of Maryland College Park (USA), University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (USA), Texas Tech University (USA), San Diego State University (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), National Central University (Taiwan), Indian Institute of Astrophysics (India), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (India), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), The Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University (Sweden), Humboldt University (Germany), Liverpool John Moores University (UK).

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