Research Projects

The discovery of GW150916 in 2015 opened up the field of gravitational wave (GW) astronomy, while the discovery of GW170817 in 2017 opened up the field of gravitational wave multi-messenger astronomy. It is a new field of research having great potential, especially due to the recent approval of LIGO-India. GW170817 is currently the only gravitational wave event (binary neutron star merger) having an electromagnetic counterpart and it raises new questions like what are the true rates of binary neutron star mergers, what are the structures of jets launched by neutron star mergers and what are the energies released by mergers. I will address these questions will be addressed through a two-prong approach: 1) observational studies of neutron star mergers discovered by LIGO-Virgo and 2) blind radio searches for neutron star mergers. The ongoing LIGO-Virgo O4 observing and huge volumes of survey data from the Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope will be leveraged to identify suitable GW events for radio afterglow follow up studies to address questions like the ones mentioned above. There will be substantial advancement in the field of GW multimessenger astrophysics even with the detection of one more electromagnetic counterpart of a binary neutron star merger. The output from this work will be journal publications - with 1-2 of them being very high impact papers if another GW event with an EM counterpart is found. Even in the rare case that there are no detections of neutron star mergers, we will still be able to place stringent upper limits on the rates of these mergers. Prompt radio signals have been proposed for neutron star mergers and widefield low-frequency surveys are ideal to find these, in addition to fast radio transients, given the large localization regions of gravitational-wave sources. Our long term goal is to develop a radio wide-field imaging telescope that can act as a transient follow and monitoring up system. As part of this proposal we will execute RFI survey and develop a demonstrator low-frequency array within the IIT Kanpur campus. If this objective is reached, then our effort will lead to a sensitive widefield radio array over the next few years and may in the long-term culminate in the development of a unique national low-frequency radio observational facility (having fields of view much larger than that offered by telescopes like the GMRT).