COSPAR Alumni Corner

In this occasional column, we bring you news from our Alumni, early career scientists who have taken part in a COSPAR Capacity Building Workshop or even in the COSPAR Fellowship Program.

Getting the COSPAR fellowship is one of the best things to happen during my PhD. The idea of the project seeded during the COSPAR Capacity Building Workshop 2019, organized in IISER Mohali, India. Later on, I started working on the AstroSat observation of accretion-powered millisecond pulsar SAX J1748.9-2021 with Dr. Aru Beri and Dr. Andrea Sanna. With the announcement to PCB travel Fellowship, I applied for a fellowship to visit Dr. Andrea Sanna to learn more about the timing analysis techniques. In November 2019, I received the result and got the grant partially funded by COSPAR and ISRO.

With coordination with Dr. Sanna, I planned to visit the University of Cagliari, Italy in February 2020. Dr. Sanna also arranged for local accommodation at the University Guest House. The visit was of three weeks duration and a very fruitful one. I learned about timing analysis, met other distinguished researchers of the University of Cagliari and made future collaborations. We published our results from SAX J1748.9-2021 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) (Sharma et al. 2020).

Next, we extended our project to other accretionpowered pulsars and results from the same were submitted to MNRAS for publication (Sharma et al. 2022). The paper is currently in the review process and we hope to get it published in the coming months.

This research visit has helped me a lot and in my thesis work which was submitted to University of Delhi, India. It opened new doors for further collaborations and gave me further courage to extend the project ideas. Fortunately (or unfortunately), my research visit was just completed before the Covid outbreak. After returning to India everything was on hold and the whole country was under lockdown. My thesis work got delayed due to it but I was able to complete it by September 2020. That was a difficult time but we came through it.

Apart from the research work, I roamed around and explored the city of Cagliari, on the beautiful island of Sardinia. I explored their culture, festivals and delicious Italian food. I also visited Rome at the end of my visit before heading back to India. Overall it was a wonderful experience from my first international trip.

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge and thank the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for all the support they provided. I would like to thank Dr. Andrea Sanna and the University of Cagliari for their hospitality during the research visit. I would like to thank Prof. Mariano Mendez for his help and support during the application process. I would also like to thank Dr. Aru Beri and Prof. Anjan Dutta for their help and support.