Seminar/ Colloquium

Title: Observational understanding of star formation in the Milky Way and infrared instrumentation

Abstract:

Understanding how stars form within the Universe is one of the fundamental questions in modern astrophysics and is central to many other fields. In this talk, I will briefly describe the current astrophysical understanding of the formation of low-mass (Sun-like) and high-mass (> 8 Msun) stars out of the interstellar medium in the Milky Way, based on our long-term monitoring observations of a few rare type of eruptive young low-mass young stellar objects and from our ongoing investigation of high-mass star formation at the periphery of Galactic H II regions. In the second part of my talk, I will give a brief description of the activities of the Infrared Astronomy Group (DAA) of TIFR with special emphasis on the ground-based near-infrared and balloon-borne Instrumentation for star formation studies.

About the Speaker: Prof. Devendra Kumar Ojha obtained his PhD from Louis Pasteur University Strasburg (France)  in 1994 followed by Post Doctoral Fellowships from IUCAA, Pune, and Institut d’ Astrophysique de Paris, France. He joined the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, TIFR Mumbai in 1997 and is currently a Senior Professor and Dean of TIFR. He is also the Chairperson and Convener for the TIFR Balloon Facility at Hyderabad.  Prof. Ojha is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the Indian Academy of Sciences.  His main area of research is in Multi-wavelength observational analysis of various populations in our Galaxy. He is also actively involved in Astronomical Instrumentation for ground-based telescopes as well as in the development of balloon and space-borne payloads for space-based infrared astronomy.