Khagol-128-OCT-2021

| KHAG L | No. 128 - OCTOBER 2021 | 10 TheDepartment of Physics, Mar ThomaCollege, Chungathara and the Providence Women's College, Calicut conducted the Regional AstronomyMeeting for the Southern region of India, in association with IUCAA, during September 8 - 10, 2021. The purpose of the meeting was to help the researchers of the region in updating themselves with the latest developments in the field and in identifying new research areas and problems. This was also envisaged to serve as a platform for interacting with scientists from the field and for fostering further teamwork and collaborations. Due to the pandemic Covid-19, we used the onlinemediumfor themeeting. The meeting was inaugurated by Somak Raychaudhury, Director, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune and felicitated by Kandaswamy Subramanian, Dean, IUCAA. The plenary lectures on the theme of Future Astronomy in India was delivered in the mornings by Bala Iyer (ICTS, Bengaluru), Shyama Narendranath (ISAC, Bengaluru) and Ajit Parameswaran (ICTS, Bengaluru). Due to the enhanced response to the meeting, the sessions were arranged in parallel. During these three days of the meeting, we had presentations from research scholars interspersed with the overview talks by senior researchers, spread into eight sessions. The meeting discussed the areas of research including Cosmology, Stellar Astrophysics, X-ray Astronomy, Extragalactic Astronomy, ISM and galactic astronomy and Radio Astronomy. There were a few presentations by Post Graduate students on the curricular projects they did in the field of Astrophysics. Altogether there were three plenary Lectures, 5 Special review talks, 14 invited review talks, 35 contributed talks and 11 UG/ PG presentations. The special talks on the seminal work from the region which attracted media attention were arranged Research In Astronomy: Opportunities and Challenges Seventh Southern Regional Meeting September 8-10, 2021 every day in the morning session, just after the plenary lectures. To compensate for the usual discussions and interactions which used to happen in the 'physical' meetings, two interaction sessions were also arranged in the evenings of September 8th and 9th. This year, the consolidated abstract book, including all abstracts of the talks in the meeting, was released on the third day of the workshop. The workshopwas coordinated by Sheelu Abraham (Mar Thoma College, Chungathara), Jeena K (Providence Women's College, College inKozhikode) and RanjeevMisra (IUCAA).