Khagol Bulletin # 135 (Jan 2025) - ENG

| 07 | KHAG L | No. 135 - JANUARY 2025 An i n t r oduc t o r y wo r kshop t i t l ed 'Gravitational waves and LIGO-India' was held at BITS Pilani, Pilani campus, organised by IUCAA, Pune, and the Department of Physics, BITS Pilani from Oc t obe r 15-19 , 2024 . Fo r t y- f i ve Gravitational Waves and LIGO-India participants attended the workshop, with most of them from BITS, Pilani and the remaining participants from other institutes in the country. The primary objective of the workshop was to introduce a p r e l imi n a r y und e r s t a nd i ng o f gravitational waves and their applications to the Masters-level and early-stage Ph.D. students from the Physics department and other motivated students from the engineering departments. Events outside IUCAA International Conference on “Neutron star Equation Of State and Gravitational Waves” (NEOSGrav2024) All the scientific sessions were held at the Kenilworth Hotel in Goa. In addition to the science sessions, there were two public talks during the event. The first public talk, An international conference titled 'Neutron star Equation of State and Gravitational Waves' (NEOSGrav2024) was organised by IUCAA at Goa from October 01-04, 2024. The aim of the conference was to bring together experts from different domains in neutron star physics: theoretical modelling, numerical modelling, as well as mu l t i -me s s e n g e r a s t r o p h y s i c a l observations. The sessions covered invited talks and contributed talks on inter- d i s c i p l i n a r y a s p e c t s , i n c l u d i n g fundamental physics, constraining the Neutron Star Equation of State (EOS) with electromagnetic and gravitational wave observations, as well as numerical simulations. Forty-five participants, including international and national invited speakers, faculty, research scholars and post-doctoral fellows, attended the conference in person, while eleven experts delivered invited talks online. “How do you take the picture of a black hole”, was delivered by Prof. Luciano Rezzolla (Goethe University of Frankfurt amMain, Germany) on October 01, 2024, at Hotel Kenilworth. The second public lecture, “When worlds collide” by Prof. Nils Andersson (University of Southampton, U.K.) was held at the Goa Science Centre and Planetarium, Panjim on October 04, 2024. A heritagewalking tour inPanjimwas also organised for the visitors by the Goa Science Centre. There was also an opportunity for the participants to interact during the networking evening. The conference was organised by Debarati Chatterjee and her Ph.D. students (Bikram Keshari Pradhan, Suprovo Ghosh, Swarnim Shirke, Nilaksha Barman, Pranjal Tambe) from IUCAA, with support from the Scientific Organising Committee (Dipankar Bhattacharya, Ashoka University, Sukanta Bose, Washington State University, USA and Prayush Kumar, ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru) and Local Organising Committee (Reshma Raut Dessa i , Goa Un i vers i t y and Anantharaman S.V., Ashoka University). The event received an overwhelming response fromboth the invited speakers as well as the participants.