Research
At the age of 16, I found out one can get paid to learn about the Universe – Isn’t that a Cool Job? For anyone new to the world of research, we as Astronomers try to make sense of the physical and chemical processes going on in our Universe. And we do that by making theoretical models, collecting data through telescopes, and analyzing that. For eg, astronomers found out that there are more than 5000 planets outside our solar system and maybe we can find life elsewhere in our Universe.
I can go on to talk about this forever, but that is the goal of Outreach page. Here, I walk you through my research experience so far.
Insterstellar Medium
For my MSc Astronomy research project, I have been studying Interstellar Medium a.k.a clouds of gas and dust between the stars.
We have gazed up into the night sky for thousands of years in order to comprehend our Universe. That’s how most Astronomy happens. But there are only a few problems that last 100 years. One of those are Diffuse Interstellar Bands. In 1919, while studying stars, we found some patterns of light that didn’t match any known molecule. These came from the matter between us and the stars – the interstellar medium.
The challenge is complicated by the fact that there are 1.2 million possible molecules that may be producing them, plus, the difficulty of recreating a space environment in a lab to record the spectrum of potential molecules. So, you may be thinking, why can’t we run a computational simulation that simulates the spectrum of potential molecules and determine which one best matches our observation? Yes, we can, and that’s my research. Our best bet are large carbonaceous molecules. If you are curious, our research group is part of the EDIBLES consortium which uses data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in chile.
I’ll soon be uploading my results and research report here.
ExoMoons