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Mercury, Jan/Feb 1996 Table of Contents

by Jayant V. Narlikar, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics

(c) 1996 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

A rupee for your thoughts: That was about all the support India gave its academic astronomers -- until a few years ago, when a new research center assembled a critical mass of money and talent.

The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics was founded in 1988 in response to a growing need felt by the university sector in India. Since 1947, when India gained independence from the British Raj, there has been a rapid growth in the number and size of universities, largely as a response to the demand for higher education. This growth in quantity, however, has not been matched by growth in the quality of infrastructure. In science and technology, particularly, the high-quality equipment and trained personnel have gone mostly outside the university sector, to national laboratories and institutes of technology.

In astronomy and astrophysics, the leading institutions outside the university sector are the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore, Karnataka, which operates the 2.3-meter Vainu Bappu Telescope at Kavalur, Tamil Nadu; the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, which specializes in space, radio, and atmospheric physics; the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, which has groups in radio astronomy, space astronomy, and theoretical astrophysics; and the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, which has theorists and observers in radio and millimeter-wave astronomy. A total of 300 professional astronomers belong to the Astronomical Society of India, which also has student and amateur members.

Almost all of these national facilities lie outside the ambit of the universities. Consequently, astronomy features amongst the subjects in which the universities have suffered considerable decline. Although there are a few astronomy researchers in a typical department of physics or mathematics, they are isolated with negligible library support, poor computing facilities, and hardly any access to telescopes. Yet it is the universities that the country must look to for young scientists who will be the users of new facilities being planned, such as the National Large Optical Telescope, or nearing completion, such as the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope.

The University Grants Commission, the government body that funds academic research in India, did not have the resources to endow a large number of universities with viable astronomy facilities. Thus, its chairman, Yash Pal, a space physicist, decided instead to create a centralized astronomy and astrophysics facility at the disposal of all universities in the country: the IUCAA in Pune, Maharashtra, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Bombay.

The facility, dedicated in the presence of Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar on Dec. 28, 1992, includes an up- to-date library, 30 Sun computer workstations, email, a data center with remote login of foreign databases, and an instrumentation laboratory for building devices on a do-it-yourself basis. To enable university faculty and students to come, the center has an associateship program that reimburses travel expenses and provides visitors with local hospitality. The complex has a number of guest rooms and apartments and a canteen.

Reversing the Brain Drain

In January 1994, the center hosted the International School for Young Astronomers [see "The International Astronomical Union," March/April 1995, p. 18]. In January 1995, with the support of the Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research, the center held a school on large-scale structure, with students and resource people from both India and France. Under a special program, the Smithsonian Institution has sponsored advanced workshops at the center on high-energy astrophysics and instrumentation each of the past three years.

What has been the impact of IUCAA? It is too early to assess it fully. Certainly it has injected new enthusiasm into the university astronomy community. The number of its users is rising: Last year, visitors spent a total of 8,000 days at the center. It has even been possible for the center to arrange guest-observership of national and foreign facilities -- unimaginable in the pre-IUCAA days. The attractive environment of the center has pulled back a few brains that had drained to the West.

Astronomy education in India at the school level still needs considerable augmentation. Only one chapter describing astronomy, all the way from the solar system to the expanding universe, appears in school geography texts. The center therefore interfaces with schoolteachers and amateur astronomers. Workshops for making sky globes, 6-inch Dobsonians, mini- planetariums, and so forth are popular. The amateur-professional tie-up was fully utilized during the total solar eclipse on Oct. 24, 1995, when an army of observers was deployed to trace the path of the Moon's shadow in an attempt to measure the Sun's radius.

The center invites secondary-school children to spend a week of their summer vacation working with astronomers. So far, 350 have taken advantage of this scheme. There is also a monthly program, on the second Saturday, of lectures to schoolchildren; the 500-seat auditorium overflows on almost every occasion. This seeding of interest in astronomy at a young age is important. The potential users and supporters of telescopes, like the telescopes themselves, have to nurtured over many years.

JAYANT V. NARLIKAR is director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, Maharashtra, India. When Narlikar started his Ph.D. studies under Fred Hoyle at Cambridge University in 1960, Hoyle advised him not to dabble in the controversial steady-state theory of cosmology. A few months later, however, Hoyle asked his new student to defend the theory at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting. "Since then my life has been one full of cosmological controversy, but I enjoy it all the more," Narlikar told Mercury. His email address is jvn@iucaa.ernet.in.