Khagol Bulletin # 131

In conclusion, Dr Joshi emphasised the need for an enlightened society to ensure enlightened innovators and generate wealth for the nation. He also highlighted • The commercialisation of bulletproof jackets. The research implications include reduced dependency on imported technology, economic benefits, and the nation's empowerment with domestic technology. • Development of carbon nanotubes for various applications. • Successful production of titanium at a lower cost. cost of importing titanium and carbon nanotubes, prompting the need for domestic production. The aim was to develop domestic technology for economic and national benefit. The methodology involved a pilot plant for titanium recovery, developing carbon nanotubes, and implementing applications such as bulletproof jackets, hydrogen storage, and compositematerials. The results include t h e impo r t a n c e o f imp l eme n t i ng technology for societal benefit and announced the upcoming launch of anMBA program in social entrepreneurship. He further emphasised on the potential for societal and economic impact through the implementation of technology and the cultivation of scientific temper. Dr Joshi highlighted and appreciated IUCAA's role in promoting scientific temper and expressed interest in collaboratingwith IUCAA. The lecture ended with a lively discussion with the audience and questions taken online overYouTube. The recorded lecture is available at the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/live/Fa_jcLmY3YA?si=af8sRQ-HopIuIfyg Research Highlights Cracking the Mystery of Compact Stars with Gravitational Waves Neutron stars (NS) are compact objects formed when massive stars end their lives in cataclysmic supernova explosions. Discovered serendipitously at radio frequencies by Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student at Cambridge University, in 1967, these compact stars have been observed throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. But there has been no 1 7 A u g u s t 2 0 1 7 : A g r o u n d - b r e a k i n g announcement by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration revolutionised the landscape of modern astronomy. A gravitational wave signal had been detected from a collision of two Neutron Stars, suggesting a novel technique to probe the interior of massive compact objects directly. This event, followed by detections of electromagnetic signals at multiple wavelengths by telescopes observing the same source, confirmed several hypotheses associated with such merger events and thus ushered in a new era of Multi-messenger astronomy. The enigmatic interior of neutron stars provides clues about the properties of matter far beyond our current understanding. Being the densest possible object in the Universe, neutron stars allow us to see nature at its most extreme. Their dense interior may harbour a zoo of strange particles such as hyperons (strange baryons) or quark matter (fundamental constituents of particles). Our knowledge of the fundamental constitution of matter is limited to terrestrial experiments, such as those performed in nuclear laboratories or heavy- ion experiments at particle accelerators. But neutron stars surpass our current understanding of densematter by several orders, so one resorts to theoretical models to explain their behaviour and compare the theoretical predictions with astrophysical data. However, the uncertainties in observational data analysis and extrapolation of our current theoretical understanding to unknown possibility to probe directly into the mysterious interior of such objects until recently. | 03 | KHAG L | No. 131 - JANUARY 2024