The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

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Koushik Chatterjee

Center for Astrophysics

Koushik Chatterjee

koushik.chatterjee@cfa.harvard.edu

About

Koushik Chatterjee completed his undergraduate degree in India and finished his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2020. His work focuses on black hole accretion and jet propagation and he performs large-scale numerical simulations as well as algorithm and code development. His research interests lie in investigating the complex physics of astrophysical jets and disks to interpret the observed multiwavelength electromagnetic emission from black hole systems. To generate the simulations and synthetic observations, he works with the state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated GRMHD code H-AMR and the GR ray-tracing code BHOSS.

PhD Astrophysics, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Telescopes and Instruments

Chandra

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA’s flagship X-ray observatory, providing essential data on everything from the environment surrounding newborn stars to the emissions from hot plasma inside galaxy clusters. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), as part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, manages Chandra’s day-to-day operations, providing spacecraft control, observation planning, and data processing for astronomers. Chandra is one of NASA’s orbiting Great Observatories, along with the Hubble.

Visit the Chandra Website

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)

Black holes are found in the centers of most galaxies, where they can influence star formation and the distribution of atoms in the environment surrounding them. However, direct observation of a black hole is difficult because it is so small relative to their masses. Founded by Shep Doeleman at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first image ever taken of a black hole: specifically, the ring of light produced by matter just as it falls into the black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy M87. The EHT is a virtual observatory consisting of telescopes spanning the planet, from Greenland to the South Pole. The international collaboration operating the EHT includes observatories affiliated with the Center for Astrophysics: the CfA’s Submillimeter Array (SMA) and the Greenland Telescope.

Visit the EHT Website