Not All Black

GMRT is far better known outside the country. Scientists from Oxford and Cambridge have used it to map galaxies. The telescope has also interested the California-based Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), drawn also by India's computing expertise.

Its crowning glory was in March 2003, when Paulo C. Freire (NAIC, USA), Scott Ransom (Canada) and Yashwant Gupta, NCRA associate professor and scientist, found a new pulsar (psr J0514-4002A) in the NGC1851 globular cluster (large, dense star clusters on the Milky Way's periphery). The pulsar, the first discovered by the GMRT, is one of the most unusual of its type, and its conditions parallel the process that creates a pulsar-black hole system. The discovery riveted the attention of the international astronomical community, besides boosting morale at the GMRT.