A Story of Kerala-Bengal Sunshine from Saha to NASA

It was one cold August morning of 2017 and I was sitting at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Norway to listen to a seminar about stars. From behind my chair, I heard a top Norwegian scientist utter the word ‘Saha’s equation’. Being an admirer of Meghnad Saha’s works, I felt very happy and proud that astrophysicists all over the world still remember this raw genius from Bengal. 

When I reached my residence in Oslo that day, I narrated this incident proudly to a young Bengali friend and he asked me: “Who is this Saha?” I was surprised that young people in his own state didn’t know this homegrown hero. 

That night I wrote an email to Mr Sankarshan Thakur (the present Editor of The Telegraph Calcutta) asking if I can write a short piece about Saha for their newspaper. He readily agreed and connected me to Prasun Chaudhuri, who is in charge of the science page of the Telegraph. 

My article about Saha and his equation got a fair share of readership both in India and abroad. Interestingly, Saha’s granddaughter Ms Ishani Das (who is an actress based in New York) wrote to me after reading my article. She wrote that she is so impressed with her granddad’s scientific achievements so much so that she would like to shoot a film about this. She asked if I can help her to fix interviews with prominent Indian scientists who are familiar with Saha’s work.

I connected her to scientists at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics Bengaluru and she was visiting this institution to conduct the interviews and do her filmmaking tracing the roots of her grandpa. At that time, she mentioned about her meeting a young smart student named Mr Souvik Bose who was pursuing an M.Tech in Astronomical Instrumentation at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. She said he is interested in doing his PhD abroad and connected me. I was a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo at that time. I gave a bit of career guidance and shared some tips and tricks about life and work in Oslo with Souvik. 

He successfully secured a PhD scholarship at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo purely on his merit in 2017. I remember meeting this young student in person for the first time at a popular pub in Oslo after he arrived in Norway. He had a pleasant personality and was fully motivated to do some original work in astrophysics. He treated me like a senior and mentor asking about my experiences and advice for a younger scientist. 

I was impressed by his knowledge, enthusiasm and positive outlook on life and work. I thought this guy had some potential to go a long way in science.

Living up to my expectations, he won the prestigious best PhD thesis prize for the year 2021 from the International Astronomical Union (IAU). He went on to do a Post Doctoral Fellowship funded by the University of Oslo. 

After receiving his PhD degree and postdoc, he joined the world-famous Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in the USA. He became an accomplished solar physicist studying the deep dynamics of our sun. 

Going one more notch higher, a few days back his latest work about sun got published by the prestigious journal Nature Astronomy. 

Moreover, this work was awarded an official NASA press release on 15 Apr 2024. Hence it was widely reported by national and international media. 

In 1999, bright patches of plasma on the sun were detected by NASA's TRACE mission. Astrophysicists called it ‘moss’ resembling the greenish feature we see on our ground. The study led by Souvik and his team has managed to unlock an answer as to why there is ‘moss’ on the sun. These ‘moss’ like features appear near sunspots. 

Latest observations from NASA’s High Resolution-Coronal Imager (Hi-C) sounding rocket and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission provide clues into understanding the superheating mechanism behind the Sun’s moss regions. The data, accompanied by 3D simulations, has revealed that the flow of electric currents on the Sun’s surface within a web of magnetic lines creates the moss.

The Sun consists of charged particles and plasma, which flow along its magnetic lines. When strong magnetic fields express themselves, they prevent the upward movement of hot gases from the Sun’s interior by convection. The heat remains trapped, lowering the temperature slightly on the Sun’s surface and forming planet-sized tiny dots — the sunspots.

The latest results about the heating mechanism behind the moss regions on the Sun provide answers to deeper questions about heat transfer mechanisms within the Sun’s structure. They try to explain another well-known but less-understood facet of the Sun — why its corona, or outer atmosphere, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface.

“Thanks to the high-resolution observations and our advanced numerical simulations, we’re able to figure out part of this mystery that’s stumped us for the past quarter of a century. However, this is just a piece of the puzzle; it doesn’t solve the whole problem,” says lead author Dr Souvik Bose.

This was his second NASA press release at such an early age. In 2019, he was bestowed with the NASA Award of Merit by the Associate Center Director of NASA Ames Research Center to acknowledge his outstanding contribution to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for space exploration and humanity. 

Souvik hails from a very simple and humble Indian background and still retains his Indian nationality and passport. He completed his schooling in Assam and West Bengal. His father Mr Soumyen Bose retired from a small business 15 years ago and his mother Mrs Chandra Bose is a homemaker. Both parents gave high value to education, learning and connection to the Bengali roots. 

The surname Bose has a history of making our nation proud over the years. Whether it be Jagdish Chandra Bose’s unconventional experiments with microwaves or Satyendranath Bose’s insightful work in Bose-Einstein statistics, they have become landmark achievements in the history of science. 

Not everyone in India knows that Physics Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs, who passed away recently, had the Higgs boson named after him; that ‘boson’ is named after the Bengali scientist Satyendranath Bose. 

When I see this young budding solar physicist Souvik Bose’s name attached to so many papers and recognitions already, I really hope and pray that he also gets to belong to this illustrious list of scientific stalwarts in the lineage of Boses before him. 
That will be ultimately the most satisfying moment a mentor or guru can get from his mentee or shishya. After all, it is one’s work and legacy which will survive after one’s time. 

Today I feel a sense of reflected glory and indirect pride similar to that experienced by the ace sporting legend Pullela Gopichand. He never had the luck and fortune to win an Olympics medal himself although he was a superb player in his time. But both his shishyas Ms. Saina Nehwal and Ms. P V Sindhu managed to win Olympics medals for India. He became a true Dronacharya of badminton in that way.

Similarly neither I won a best PhD thesis prize from IAU nor received a NASA press release for my own works. However, when my shishya won these prestigious honours now, it felt immensely gratifying as a guru. I can proudly say that I happened to mentor some ‘star’ material students over the years and indirectly become a mini-Dronacharya in the world of astrophysics and space science.

NASA will launch the Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) mission to study the Sun. With ISRO’s latest solar mission Aditya L1 orbiting the sun in full glory, our country’s bright young solar physicists like Bose have a bright path ahead to conquer the skies far and beyond! 

(The author is an Indian astrophysicist and science writer)