Barnali Das From Assam Leads NCRA Astronomers Team To Discover Rare Radio Stars

Pune: An Assamese girl named Branali Das along with her colleagues and her supervisor Prof. Poonam Chandra from NCRA has discovered rare radio stars.

A research paper describing these new results has been recently accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

According to an official statement, the lead author Barnali Das who hails from the Bajali district of Assam recently completed Ph D thesis, working under the supervision of Prof. Poonam Chandra, at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune.

Both Das and Prof. Chandra have been actively involved in various projects aiming at the characterization of this little known class of objects MRPs.

In fact, the name MRP was introduced by them in the year 2020. In an effort to understand their properties, they have performed the most extensive study of MRPs over an ultra-wide frequency range, using two of the world's leading radio telescopes: the GMRT and the U.S. based Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

Their work, for the first time, showed that the radio pulses emitted by MRPs contain a vast amount of information regarding the stellar magnetosphere. The pulsed radio emission from MRPs is the only visible signatures of the theoretical models which predict tiny explosions in magnetic massive stars which occur at specific locations in the magnetosphere of the star, the statement added.

The NCRA said the team had also identified three more such stars in the past using the GMRT. Therefore, of the total 15 MRPs known so far, 11 were discovered with the GMRT, of which eight were discovered in 2021 alone, thanks to the wide bandwidth and high sensitivity of the upgraded GMRT, the release stated.

"These findings are the fruits of a continuous review with the GMRT. So, this study especially resolves the mystery of MRPs," it added.

The statement further said that the success of the GMRT programme has revolutionized the notion about this class of stars, and has opened up a new window to study their exotic magnetospheres.

"The success of the GMRT programme has revolutionized our notion about this class of stars. Though the first MRP was discovered in 2000, it was only due to the high sensitivity of the uGMRT that the discovery of more such stars as possible. The success of the survey with the uGMRT suggests that the current notion of MRPs as rare objects may not be correct. Rather, they are probably more common but are difficult to detect," says Barnali Das, a PhD student at the NCRA-TIFR, who has been actively studying this phenomenon.

"The pulsed radio emission from MRPs is the only visible signatures of the theoretical models which predict tiny explosions in magnetic massive stars that occur at specific locations in the magnetosphere of the star. These explosions have been predicted to play an important role in regulating the transport of wind materials surrounding the star, and are likely to affect the stellar evolution as well," Ms. Das observes.

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