Russia launched into space its Spektr-R radio telescope planned to be the most powerful ever, the first deep space observatory sent up by Moscow in a quarter of a century.
Spektr-R will scour the fringes of the universe for black holes, mysterious quasar radio sources and also the fast rotating stellar remnants known as pulsars, Russian space agency Roskosmos said.
The instrument, dubbed the ‘Russian Hubble’ after the iconic US space telescope but many thousands of times more powerful, will give astronomers opportunities for looking billions of light years back in time to the young universe.
(Published 19 July 2011, 17:29 IST)
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