BIG BANG THEORY
As a kid, to escape his parents’ arguing, Pradeepta Mohanty would go to a park near his home, lie on the grass and gaze at the night sky. “It gave me a sense of wonder, and a sense of peace,” he says. There wasn’t much an aspiring astronomer could look forward to in his hometown in Odisha, though, so Mohanty became a mechanical engineer and now works at an oil refinery in Madhya Pradesh. But he never got over his love affair with the stars.
So when he came upon the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory during a random search for astronomy groups on Facebook five years ago, he signed up immediately. This is a citizen science project that trains anyone who has or is pursuing a degree in science or engineering, to scan patches of sky and make astronomical observations.
Through Facebook e-classes, Skype calls and telephone conversations with Ananda Hota, a radio astronomer at the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences (CEBS), Mohanty, now 30, learnt how to use NASA Skyview’s virtual telescope to generate images of any part of the sky, ana- lyse the data from the all-sky surveys done by TIFR’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), and find celestial objects catalogued online.
For three hours a day, Mohanty scans footage on his laptop and marks faint-andfuzzy objects that could indicate unique galaxies with supermassive black holes, radio-jet interactions and star formations.
“Citizen science speeds up research. It’s possibly the only way to meet the Big Data challenge in astronomy,” says Hota. This project was launched in 2013 and is supported by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (Pune) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR, Mumbai), among others.
It currently has 110 citizen scientists scanning footage of the sky across India. Some of their findings, including Mohanty’s galaxy merger, were cited in a 2016 paper titled ‘Tracking galaxy evolution through low-frequency radio continuum observations using SKA and citizenscience research using multi-wavelength data’, in the Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy published by the Indian Academy of Sciences and Springer Nature.