Star at the centre of a new universe

Sitting down with a drink and watching the sun go down as a red ball over the sea is a memorable sight anywhere in Kerala, especially when you are sitting at a resort bar, appropriately named The Sundowner. It goes to another level when you are watching the spectacle with someone who has devoted her entire career to studying the Sun.

Dr Madhulika Guhathakurta is more than just a Lead Program Scientist at Nasa. She was instrumental in developing a new branch of physics that is now being taught across the globe to students, a distinction that very few scientists can lay claim to.

Heliophysics is the study of the physical domain influenced by the sun, which means it spans the entire length of our solar system.

“Billions of stars are present in our galaxy, but one of them, the Sun, is the reason we exist. Traveling at the speed of light, it will take us 100,000 light years to get from one end of the galaxy to the other. This is the only star that is close to us. We are here as a species to interpret and understand it and marvel at it. I think it is significant,” Dr Lika, as she is known, had said at the Global Science Festival Kerala (GSFK) during her speech.

Does that mean when she watches a spectacular sunset, her mind is racing through theories about energy particles and light wavelengths? “I am a scientist, but I am not an autistic one,” she says. “At least I hope I am not,” she adds, throwing her head back with a laugh.

Lika says her curiosity about the universe started as a child when she used to gaze up at the starlit skies over Calcutta, where she was born. Encouraged by her family, especially her dad, she pursued her interest in physics and earned a master's from the University of Delhi.

Then, she applied to the University of Denver in Colorado to continue her research (“because a girlfriend from India was at that university,” she explains) and moved to the US. She later married Robb Gilford, a mathematician, as she continued to pursue the real star in her heart – the sun.

She joined Nasa in 1993 and continued her research on the sun. In an area dominated by male scientists, she became the centre of that universe as the head of the Living With a Star programme funded by the US Congress to study the effect of the sun on our planet.

Did the gender disparity affect her? “No,” she says firmly. “It is an issue if you want to make it one. I never gave it a thought and continued to do my job.”

“That is one way, but we need to address this as a society, says Lika, who calls herself a Sheliophysicist.

The enthusiastic audience that received her at the Government Women's College, Trivandrum last week left a deep impression on her regarding the rising interest among women students in deep tech areas like Heliophysics.

“They were well-prepared for the talk, asking intelligent questions. Both teachers and students had done their homework well, unlike some official functions that disappoint with cut-and-paste introductions about such domains,” says Lika.

[Usually, we don't interject like this, but here we thought we should vent our frustrations at the lack of proper organisation at some of the events that take place in Kerala.

We understand exactly what Dr Madhulika Guhathakurta meant, as the top Nasa scientist had come prepared with a presentation that included slick videos. However, during the GSFK event, there was no audio output from the computer arranged for her, and the video played out as silent moving images, much to her disappointment. The voiceover in one of the videos was by Hollywood megastar Robert Redford, adding to the frustrations.

The fact that GSFK had to delay the opening of the exhibition by a few days gives you an idea of the kind of odds that organisers faced to get it off the ground. As one of them remarked, some papers were weighed down by the gravity of Jupiter in some departments, slowing down their progress despite preparations that started months in advance.

The chaos we witnessed over the last year at several conclaves and “Global” events often made us cringe at the lack of organisational skills, despite Kerala's claim of being a modern, tech-savvy environment. Sometimes, we feel, such conclaves are reduced to mere photo ops, projecting our inability to organise events effectively. Hopefully, someone up there will realise this soon.

Rant over, now read on: Editorial Desk]

Lika says that at Nasa, she also gets frustrated by the officialdom, and it required a Herculean effort to bring different experts into one domain to study the sun.

Living with the Stars started in the early 2000s, and Lika, with the help of other experts, gave it a proper direction.

“We realised that the name of our science division known as Sun-Earth Connection was too long a name, and we had to come up with ashort, concise one. The science was a combination of different branches like solar physics, ionospheric physics, magnetospheric physics and others, but looked at in a new way. So we came up with the name Heliophysics.”

“I also started a fellowship in the name of Jack Eddy, who was the first solar physicist to connect the sun to climate by using measurements of carbon-14 in dated tree rings.”

It is given to three or four PhD holders annually. In 2021, one of the recipients was Ramesh Karanam, an employee at the VSSC in Trivandrum.

“I spent 16 years with the Living with a Star programme, and it’s one of the proudest things in my life. I am no longer in charge of it, and younger members are leading it now. I am working on artificial intelligence and how to incorporate that into the huge amount of space data we have collected.”

“I am also toying with the idea of venturing out on my own and have started a website called Sheliophysicist.com,” she says.

Today, studying Heliophysics isn’t just a choice but a necessity. Our technologically vested society is very much intertwined with the various whims and fancies of what the sun does as it affects our technology. This impacts our way of life, disrupting electricity and satellites, which, in turn, can affect our communication channels, even disrupting our mobile phones.

A key achievement of the Heliophysics divisionat Nasa is the launch of the Parker Solar Probe in 2018. It will go within four million miles (~6.9 million km) of the sun by December 2024.

“It is pretty astounding that we can do that; it is truly an engineering marvel. It is the fastest spacecraft we have built. It is the fastest spacecraft we have built. As it scoots around the sun, it travels at nearly 0.064% of the velocity of light at some stages.”

The Parker Solar Probe was designed to address two very important physics questions not only relevant to the sun but to all of physics. The sun we see, the yellow, pale disc, is about 5,000 to 6,000 degrees Celsius. However, the outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona, is 2 million degrees Kelvin – much hotter than the surface.

“So, the question becomes, how is it that when you move away from a source of heat, the core of the sun, the temperature increases? That is the most important question that we are trying to answer,” says Lika.

“The Parker Solar Probe is actually in that environment, locally measuring all these particles, a place where space weather is born. The goal is, with this data, we will be able to eliminate some of the theories, validate others, or entirely new science will emerge. And that, I am sure of. We can already see evidence of that from the data we have collected,” she says.

The study of space weather is becoming more and more important as private firms enter deep space exploration, and thousands of satellites are slated to go up in the coming years. However, these man-made objects run the risk of getting hit by solar electrical storms, as Elon Musk’s Starlink found out. It lost 40 new satellites shortly after launch in early 2022 because of an electromagnetic storm.

But for DrLika, the study of the sun is much more than space weather. “Our place in the cosmic order is not separate from nature but an integral part of it. The human body contains around 20,000 different elements, mostly made in ancient stars, with the main ones being oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.”

“Inside, we are made of the same star stuff, so they hold the answer to our existence. And the only star that can help us understand, the only star which is near us and gives us the opportunity to study it in great detail, is our own sun.”

“Throughout life, we try to divide ourselves, far too much, not realising that inside all of us reside stars. We are not just made of star stuff, we ourselves are living stars.”

Indian innovator wins top spot at Davos

The Davos Summit ended with concerns about the threat of misinformation due to the rapid development of AI-based platforms. However, the news that brought us joy is that an Indian startup earned accolades at the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its innovative wastewater monitoring technology. Mumbai-based Fluid Analytics has been assisting municipal authorities in monitoring wastewater flow and preventing contamination, a challenge faced by Kerala.

Through a unique platform, they can monitor infrastructure conditions and the spread of water-borne diseases using mathematical and machine-learning models trained on proprietary global datasets, reports the Business Wire. They currently monitor underground drainage pipes in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, and Hyderabad. The WEF’s Zero Water Waste Challenge received applications from 192 global companies this year, and only ten winners were selected.

Hyderabad startup to enter Kerala sports sector

Despite being billed as a fast-rising tech sector, the sports industry in Kerala is yet to see much action. Now, Hyderabad-based Gamepoint says they are looking to enter the market here soon. The company, which runs coaching programs for children, hosts corporate tournaments, and sells equipment, currently has eight centres in Hyderabad. Entracker reports that it aims to enter cities like Trivandrum soon as it targets second and third-tier cities. The company taps into schools and residential communities to expand its business and has a revenue of over 10 crore rupees now.

Vietnamese EV maker eyes TN factory

Even as predictions about the entry of Tesla continue, Vietnamese EV maker VinFast says it will open its first integrated car factory in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu. The company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Tamil Nadu government, and construction will start this year. The factory aims to produce 150,000 electric vehicles annually at this plant. The Vietnamese company was listed on Nasdaq last year and was slated to start building a factory in North Carolina this year, but that has been delayedby a year. We will have to wait and see how their Tamil Nadu plan proceeds.

Now you may click the bride

While we are still waiting to see AI entering our astrology and horoscope matching business, authorities in Tokyo have started AI-driven matchmaking to encourage people to get married. After signing up and providing papers to prove their claims like salary, users also have to undergo an online interview. Once approved, they will be required to list their ‘values’ and those they seek in a partner. AI will then be used to link people with compatible values, reports the South China Morning Post. Matches are no longer made in heaven.