Major Atmospheric Cerenkov Experiment Telescope
| Location(s) | Hanle, Ladakh, India |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 32°46′46″N 78°57′51″E / 32.77944°N 78.96417°ECoordinates: 32°46′46″N 78°57′51″E / 32.77944°N 78.96417°E |
| Organization | Indian Astronomical Observatory |
| Altitude | 4,500 m (14,800 ft) |
| Built | 2014 |
| Collecting area | 356 m² |
| Focal length | 21 metres |
| Website | www |
 Location of Major Atmospheric Cerenkov Experiment (MACE)
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Major Atmospheric Cerenkov Experiment Telescope (MACE) is the world's largest telescope at the highest altitude being established at Hanle, Ladakh, India. It is being built by Electronics Corporation of India, Hyderabad, for the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. It was assembled at the campus of Indian Astronomical Observatory at Hanle. Operational since 2016, it is remotely operated and runs on solar power.
The telescope is the second-largest gamma ray telescope in the world and will help the scientific community enhance its understanding in the fields of astrophysics, fundamental physics, and particle acceleration mechanisms. The largest telescope of the same class is the 28-metre-diameter High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) telescope being operated in Namibia.
The telescope is named after the Soviet scientist Pavel Cherenkov, who predicted that charged particles moving at high speeds in a medium emit light. The high-energy gamma rays emitted from black holes, centers of galaxies and pulsars do not reach the land as they get absorbed in the atmosphere. Upon interaction with the atmosphere, these photons produce electron–positron pairs, leading to a cascade of particles which while moving at very high speed give rise to Cerenkov radiation.
Very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays offer a unique insight into some of the most extreme phenomena of our Universe. Detection of celestial VHE gamma rays allows the study of exotic objects like pulsars, pulsar wind nebulae, super nova remnants, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei etc where particles are accelerated to TeV (10 exp 12 eV) energies and beyond. These exceptionally energetic photons are detected on the Earth by an indirect process which uses the Earth's atmosphere as a transducer. The Cherenkov light is beamed around the direction of the incident gamma ray and covers an area of around 50,000 square meters on the ground. This effective area is far larger in magnitude than the area of satellite instruments used for detecting gamma rays directly. To detect these flashes of Cherenkov light, photomultiplier tube cameras are used at the focus of large tracking light collectors. The intensity of the image recorded by the telescope is related to the energy of the incident gamma ray photon.
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