Looking up- Love for Stars | Teja Begari | TEDxYouth@SuchitraAcademy
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bea-eqlub78 Video ID: bea-eqlub78 ============================================================ [Music] so what do you see when you look up at the night sky one can't uh think but fathom about the wonders of the heavens and Civilizations for a very long time across the globe have tried to understand the mysteries of the heavens starting from ancient Babylonians Egyptians Indians Arabs Persians who had limited data technology in fact no technology who had limited data research and instrumentation to modern day scientists with so much uh software advanced technology including so much uh including a lot of uh data points the humanity has always wondered about the universe and also our tiny perhaps special place in it astronomy is one of the old known scientist to humanity and I'm pretty sure all of us have at least once in our lifetime asked ourselves this question what lies Beyond and I am one such curious fellow who pretty much asks this question every single day my name is tja bagari and I'm an amateur astronomer and a researcher in the field my research focuses on understanding eclipsing binaries pulsars and the cosmic web now I won't get into great detail about these topics although I will give you uh kind of just through my talk but what I really want to do is share my story uh my short story about how I pursued astronomy and I really hope it's the beginning of a greater one my story starts very uh early as early as when I was in grade three when I was 8 years old we had a beautiful illustration of the solar system in my science textbook and I asked my science teacher I could recognize Earth but I quite wasn't sure what Earth was so I asked my science teacher what are these things beside Earth that uh look like Earth but in different sizes and colors she told me that these are called planets that probably was the first time I heard the word planets or at least paid attention to that was around the same time my father introduced my sister and me to the uh to the web browser I very vividly remember on a very fine Sunday he took me and my sister to the rooftop and the very first thing he showed us was the Wikipedia article of uh Dr bimr ramji ambedkar a very well-known Indian social reformer and a humanist whom my father admired I asked him if he could show us about those planets my teacher was talking about and he said yes you can literally search about anything and he showed me the Wikipedia article of uh the solar system and he wanted me to read it and I did read it I barely could understand anything but that was it for me it was partly because I didn't understand what was going on I was very curious to know more and when I was about 10 years old my mom bought me an encyclopedia and like any other encyclopedia this one had beautiful little illustrations diagrams pictures and Maps the first chapter was called space and uh uh just like other chapters this one to had beautiful illustrations of the Big Bang life cycle of a star rockets and many more in fact some of these planets were cut off to show us the insights and my interest definitely deepened them and that was the very first time my interaction with this feel happened and as time went on Co hit the world and it changed lives and for me it could not have been more true lockdown was announced and everyone was home I said I told myself I'm really interested in these Stars so why not do something and try to learn more about these stars and my father being the most supportive man ever bought me a lot of books and I took part in many quiz competitions and after about an year I wrote my very first International exam which was the international astronomy and astrophysics competition in which I secured the silver honor and uh after that I see I loved doing what I was doing just learning and reading from books but that was not enough for me I wanted to do more I started working on what we call citizen science citizen science are projects where nonprofessionals can contribute to science or any field for that matter and especially in science and astronomy it just means a greater deal and I worked on citizen science which included searching for as asteroids looking for Supernova classifying galaxies and many others as such and I wanted to join the American Association of variable star observers which is a 111 year old organization coordinating analyzing and Publishing variable St observations which are largely made by amateur astronomers and as the name suggests variable stars are stars that change the magnitude over a period of time as you can see in this picture you can see in the first slide that it is a lot more brighter and the second one it's fainter so these are what variable stars are and uh it was absolutely amazing and I wanted to join the abso and I sent out an application form uh with all the documents to join the abso and I was rejected because I was not 18 or older the abso had the policies that only members uh only people with 18 or older of age could join the organization and I was rejected and I got connected to Dr Stella kfka who was the then AA director and I told her that I'm really passionate about this and I want to be a part of the abso and she told me after all astronomy is not just for now is it and she told me that after your 18 we would welcome you Dr Kafka and I stayed in touch ever since thanks to social media and uh after about 3 months of that incident happening Avia was celebrating its 110th anniversary 110 years of variable St observations and I congratulated Dr Kafka and she invited me to be a speaker at the 110th annual conference of the ABS so which was held in Boston Massachusetts I couldn't go there so I gave my talk uh online and I spoke about how I pursued astronomy and Dr Kafka told me that it is solely because how curious and passionate you are I think you would be a perfect Ambassador for the abso and although I was not 18 or older I joined the abso and as an abso ambassador I gave multiple talks presented webinars and what I really was keen on was popularizing real science and especially in in a country like India which pseudoscientific beliefs exist I thought one of the best ways to debunk them was to popularize real science and uh I gave talks at International conferences like the 25th Annual Conference of the global handson Universe at the 111th annual conference of the abso and while I was giving uh my talk at the 111th Conference of the abso I was asked to write what we call a proceedings paper a proceedings paper is basically uh a paper in which have the summary of your talk which kind of looks like a research paper but it's not quite one and it felt very interesting to see my proceedings paper being published in the JSO so the J is a journal of the abso and it's a research Journal so I asked some seniors at the ABS so if there was if there was a possibility for me to conduct real research and publish those results in the uh in the JBS so I was asked to look at variable stars and calculate their magnitude and send those reports abso which is basically what abso observers around the world do you see I would have loved to do that but because of the City Light pollution I barely could see any stars let alone variable Stars I reached out to Professor Thomas J macron who is the President's excellence and research professor at the department of physics and astronomy at Texas Tech University and I told him that I'm really passionate about conducting research I love Stars I love the universe uh I really want to conduct research in astronomy Dr macron is known for his scholarship in X3 astrophysics and he fortunately accepted me to be his research assistant and we started working on what we call amcn systems so as you can see in this illustration by the NASA NASA's Shandra ex telescope amvn which stands for am canonum are systems where the denser star is quite literally sucking in material from the other star and our research involved looking at the extreme Luminosity plotting against the orbital period of am CBN systems and comparing this result to already existing theoretical model prediction after working with Dr macron for about 7 months I published my very first research paper at the age of 17 in the Journal of the American Association of variable store observers which was then told by the referees according to the referees was the largest study conducted on these systems at the time of publication and I fell in love with resar it was amazing although it was very hard it was amazing and I love to I I said I told myself that I wanted to work on many other research projects as such and explore astronomy are domains of astronomy because astronom is a very broad field and I sent out about 28 emails to 28 different professors and guess how many got back to me just one who happens to be my other research supervisor Dr AA kenko who is an observational astronomer which means we look at visible light and conduct our research based off of that I was sent data from some really huge telescope from Mexico and Spain uh and our research project was about Black Widow and red back systems now Black Widow systems are systems where which are binary systems where one star is a pulsar and the other is U is its companion star and pulsars are stars that eject uh magnetic Jets from their poles and as this jet hit the other star it quite literally makes it lose its matter so these are what uh red back systems are or spider Widow uh systems are and the reason they're called uh spider black uh spider black systems is because just like black widow spiders kill their partner after meeting in a way the star is killing its partner and that is the reason why these are called uh spider black uh pulsars and uh we are currently in the writing uh stage of the research paper and hopefully the results will be published next year and I'm really looking forward for that happening and my current research involves an understanding The Cosmic web which helps us understand the larger scale structure of the universe and eclipsing binaries which are stars that orbit each other and when one star goes around the other you can see the dip in the light curve because of uh the lessening of the magnitude over a period of time so my research Journey has been going so great so far but the thing is research isn't very easy it's super complicated because it's real science you publish results out there which will be used by other scientists and you have to be as precise as possible and especially for me as a high school student it was very hard because as whenever I was head with the problem I couldn't figure out the solution in a day or two sometimes it took weeks to get to a solution but about everything it's always about the Curiosity when I got to know about these resource projects with with my supervisors uh I was always very curious not only that I would get to work on these projects but also because I would get to understand what was happening with these systems in a way quite literally uh exploring the mysteries of the cosmos and I've published in international journals and magazines uh in the global skyup astronomy magazine I've published in China twice and in Serbia once about uh my research and my research projects and what I really want to do is um inspire people and not necessarily to uh get into astronomy but to let them know that the universe is filled with infinite possibilities and that the sky is not the limit my my passion is to answer some of the biggest questions to which I'm not sure if you would get concrete answers in my lifetime but I want to but what I want to do is contribute to getting to these answers and what I want to tell you people is that as I said before the universe is l Lally filled with infinite possibilities and you never know what's going to happen and always believe in yourself keep looking up the sky is not the limit thank you