Ahmedabad University Launches International Centre for Space and Cosmology

Ahmedabad University announces the launch of a new International Centre for Space and Cosmology. The Centre will drive cutting edge research in the areas of Space, Astrophysics and Cosmology, train next generation of researchers, and advance the public understanding of this very exciting domain of Physics. The Centre seeks to reach out to young students to encourage them to consider a research career in Space and Cosmology and provide them with information regarding opportunities in these areas.

The Centre will operate closely with other research clusters at Ahmedabad University. The International Centre for Space and Cosmology is also planning workshops and conferences, looking to host visitors for short and long durations, engage with students across the world who have an interest in Astrophysics, Space and Cosmology, and create academic programmes.

Anchored at Ahmedabad University’s School of Arts and Sciences, the Centre will work in collaboration with colleagues nationally and internationally with related interests. The Director, Professor Pankaj Joshi, is a scientist acknowledged for his fundamental contributions in Black Hole Physics and Cosmology. One of his major topics of research is the possibility of gravitational collapse of massive stars into naked singularities rather than black holes.

The other founding faculty members of the Centre are Professor Gaurav Goswami and Professor Raghavan Rangarajan, both of whom work on Cosmology and High Energy Physics, particularly in the context of early Universe physics and correlations with observations of the Universe today.

The launch of the new Centre coincides with recent observations by the Event Horizon Telescope (May 2022) of the highly compact and dense object at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Using an array of networked radio telescopes around the globe, an image has been obtained showing the ultracompact object at the centre of our galaxy. The JMN (Joshi-Malafarina-Narayan) naked singularity model proposed and published in 2011 by Professor Pankaj Joshi and colleagues contributed to the modelling that underlies this discovery.

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