Atul Chhotray

This is the second and final part on the series of blogposts titled “The Science Behind the Solar Eclipse”. In this post, I will build upon the ideas and concepts discussed in Part I of the post to describe how solar eclipses occur. So I strongly recommend reading through it here. Solar eclipses occur because […]

An eclipse is defined as a total or partial obscuring of one astronomical body by another. For millennia, cultures all over the world have witnessed, marveled at, and feared eclipses. For residents of planet Earth, the two most interesting and important eclipses are of eclipses the Sun (Solar eclipse) and the Moon (Lunar Eclipse). A

This is the final part of the three part series on Spaghettification where finally black holes come into the picture! Black Holes Black holes are regions of space(time) where gravity becomes is so strong that that not even light can escape. The size of this spherical region is specified by a radius called the Schwarzschild

This is second part in the series of posts about Spaghettification. In this part we go over the idea of how gravity squeezes objects. We will also briefly discuss how to make tidal forces stronger. Squeezing Now let’s rotate the rod so that it is oriented with both ends equally distant from the Earth, while

Can black holes make spaghetti? Like Obama, black holes would reply ‘Yes we can’! To top that off they can make spaghetti out of anything – using their ‘gravitational machinery’. In this three part series we will see how black holes employ gravity to do so! Before we go exploring black hole’s ‘spaghetti skills’, in

In today’s post I will talk about Compton scattering – a physical process by which light and matter interact. Interestingly, this process is responsible for colouring our sky and also for generating electromagnetic radiation from the most energetic phenomena in the universe. A Brief History This phenomenon was first discovered by Arthur H. Compton in

Fantastic Beasts (and where to find them) Most galaxies on our universe seem to harbor, at their center, the amazing beast known as a supermassive black hole (to know more about black holes see my previous post here). What do we mean by word supermassive? Astronomers compare the mass of most objects in the universe

Hello readers! I am Atul Chhotray, a post-doctoral researcher in Sera’s group. I am a theoretical / numerical astrophysicist, which means I employ the laws of physics / computers to understand and explain the workings of the universe. I have been fascinated by black holes since time immemorial – and in this post I will