Koushik Chatterjee

There’s no doubt about it: Einstein’s general theory of relativity has changed the way we understand the cosmos, with its crowning glory being the discovery of black holes. Last year (2019), in May, I gave a short talk about the Event Horizon Telescope results on a webinar (link here) hosted by SPACE- India, an organization

I recently published my first paper in my Ph.D., focussing mainly on how jets accelerate from black hole accretion disks using first-principles general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamic simulations. It is an important question, how jets become relativistic, achieving high enough kinetic energy to affect the intergalactic medium upon collision. It turns out that the shape of jet

With the Event Horizon Telescope results just a few days away, I thought it would be great to discuss how exactly a jet is launched from a black hole. The thought is counter-intuitive. Black holes are depicted as these giant “vacuum cleaners” in the centre of galaxies, eating up anything that has the misfortune of

As one of fundamental forces, gravity works its magic on the physics of the largest scales, helping us understand how celestial objects form and move. Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century formulated a mathematical equation depicting the effect two objects have on each other by virtue of their mass. Newton’s theory successfully predicted the

Hi there! I’m Koushik, a 2nd year PhD student in Sera’s group. I did my undergrad in India, a really beautiful country and also known to lay quite a lot of emphasis on highly theoretical research work (might even be a tad too much!). While I did my masters in Physics and my thesis on