Khagol # 124 - Oct 2020

Khagol (the Celestial Sphere) is the quarterly bulletin of We welcome your feedback at the following address: IUCAA, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411 007, India. Phone : (020) 2569 1414; 2560 4100 Fax : (020) 2560 4699 email : publ@iucaa.in Web page : http://www.iucaa.in/ matchstickds@gmail.com | KHAG L | No. 124 - OCTOBER 2020 | 16 JulyTo September 2020 Annu Jacob, andRamyaManjunath. LongTermVisitors Avinash Deshpande, Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru (Visiting Professor); David Hilditch, University of Lisbon, Portugal (Adjunct Faculty); Ashish Mahabal, Caltech, USA (Adjunct Faculty); Ninan Sajeeth Philip, Artificial Intelligence Research and Intelligence Systems, Telliyoor (Visiting Professor); and A.R. Rao, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (Visiting Professor). Visitors Virtual Tour of LIGO inMinecraft On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of GW150914, the first gravitational-wave detection by LIGO, LIEPO and ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) jointly conducted an exciting live virtual tour of LIGO in Minecraft - a sandbox video game about placing blocks, on September 15, 2020. People could explore the LIGO observatory by joining the Minecraft server and “walking” with the tour guide around the LIGO model with live commentary. There was also the option of joining the tour live on –LIGO India Education and Public Outreach - Youtube Channel.After the tour, participants could ask questions using #AskLIGOIndia or #AskOzGrav on Twitter. A team of LIGO – India andOzGrav researchers answered these in realtime, and also followed up a few days later for the remaining ones. The activity was coordinated and conducted by Vaibhav Savant andOzGrav colleagues. Pravega As part of Pravega, the Indian Institute of Science annual TechFest, SomakRaychaudhury (Director, IUCAA) andVarun Bhalerao (Assistant Professor, IIT – Bombay, Mumbai) delivered invited talks in the Paradigms and the Coherence lecture series respectively. Somak Raychaudhury threw light on blackholes and their detections with gravitational waves (GW) and X-Ray observations of binary stars. He emphasised on the significance of GW studies and discussed the science case for the LIGO – India detector. The talk included a unique insider's update on the LIGO – India project, which is under construction. The main highlight of Varun Bhalerao's talk was the GW170817 binary neutron star merger detected by LIGO and Virgo detectors, and the resultant successful EM counterparts observed by other telescopes, which gave birth to an era of multi-messenger astronomy. He gave an update on India's first robotic telescope GROWTH – India and the proposedDAKSHAmission. Both the speakers also shared the numerous career opportunities that will be available to GravityMatters : Student Blog On September 14, 2020, the launching of a gravitational waves (GW) related student blog called “Gravity Matters” was announced on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the first direct detection of GW150914. The blog is intended to educate under-graduate and post-graduate students as well as the general public about the amazing GWdiscoveries, science and history in a simple and fun manner in order to get them interested in GW science. Three articles have been released under this blog as of September 30, 2020 on LIEPO's social media network - Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (@ligoindia). The Facebook posts alone have reached almost 11,000 people. In future, a variety of activities will be rolled out, which includes among other things podcast interviews of GW scientists, photo quiz, comic strips and much more. The activity is being coordinated byDebarati Chatterjee (IUCAA). students across various disciplines as the LIGO – India detector is built over the coming decade. Overall around 330 enthusiastic students attended these webinars. The talks were coordinated by Ankit Bhandari (IUCAA), and conducted by Pravega collaborators.