In news- Polar-Areas Stellar-Imaging in Polarisation High-Accuracy Experiment (PASIPHAE), an international collaborative sky surveying project helps to study the polarisation in the light coming from millions of stars.
More about PASIPHAE-
- The project name is inspired from Pasiphae, the daughter of Greek Sun God Helios.
- The survey will use two high-tech optical polarimeters to observe the northern and southern skies, simultaneously.
- It will focus on capturing starlight polarisation of very faint stars over large areas of the sky.
- Such data can help remove the galactic polarised foreground light.
- By combining these data, astronomers will perform a maiden magnetic field tomography mapping of the interstellar medium using a novel polarimeter instrument known as WALOP (Wide Area Linear Optical Polarimeter).
- WALOP will be mounted on two small optical telescopes – 1.3-metre Skinakas Observatory, Crete, and 1-metre telescope of the South African Astronomical Observatory located in Sutherland.
- Scientists from the University of Crete, Greece, Caltech, USA, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), India, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the University of Oslo, Norway, are involved in this project, steered by the Institute of Astrophysics, Greece.
- The Infosys Foundation, India, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Greece and USA’s National Science Foundation have each provided a grant of $1 million, combined with contributions from the European Research Council and the National Research Foundation in South Africa.