Research
I currently work on Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) with the CHIME Telescope. FRBs are strong radio emission signals originating from astronomical sources that are not fully identified yet. These bursts are sporadic and have an extremely small duration ranging from a few micro-seconds to milli-seconds. My work involves using and developing computational methods to process the telescope data in the hope of possibly discovering some relevant physical phenomena.
My research interests are:
- Neutron stars and FRBs
- Interstellar medium
- Stellar formation and evolution
- Cosmic Microwave Background
Previous research projects:
Effect of Weak Gravitational Lensing on CMB:
The dark matter in the universe does not interact with light. So it can not be detected very easily. However, due to its gravity, it can change the trajectory of light and its effect on other luminous matter can be studied. Because it can bend light, it can be visualised as a lens - a ‘gravitational lens’. The Cosmic Microwave Background is the radiation from the earliest times of the universe. After the big-bang, the early universe was extremely hot and dense. It was too hot for particles to combine and form atoms. But as the universe expanded, it began to cool down and eventually there was a time when the radiation in the universe didn’t have enough energy to break up an atom. That’s when the radiation ‘decoupled’ from the particles and that marks the formation of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
CMB radiation is incredibly smooth and has anisotropies of very small orders caused due to various reasons. During the inflationary phase of the universe, small fluctuations in the quantum field gave rise to the structures in the universe like - galaxy superclusters, galactic sheets. Hence, studying these tiny fluctuations in the CMB is important to understand the formation of these large-scale structures. For my master’s thesis, I worked under the guidance of Dr. Soumen Basak at IISER TVM. I computationally calculated the power spectrum of lensed CMB temperature.
Distance and Evolutionary status of Galactic Star Clusters:
During a summer internship, I worked at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad with Dr. Manash Samal. I worked on European Space Agency’s GAIA telescope’s data. GAIA’s second data release has parallaxes for more than 1.3 billion stars. In this project, I attempted to find the distances to several galactic clusters using GAIA’s parallaxes. To estimate the age, I obtained the photometric measurements of their counterparts from Pan-STARRS observations. By plotting colour-magnitude diagrams for these members and comparing those with the theoretical isochrones obtained from PARSEC, I estimated the mean age of the clusters. My work was selected for a poster at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Astronomical Society of India.