Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Monday congratulated Odisha-born astronomer Kailash Sahu for measuring the mass of a star by employing Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
“Odisha-born astronomer Kailash Sahu creates history, does what Einstein himself said was not possible (sic),” Patnaik tweeted.
The Chief Minister said that Sahu was born in Bellagam village of Ganjam district which did not have electricity when the astronomer was a child.
Sahu studied in the village school and his village saw electricity for the first time when he was 12 years old or was in Class VII. From there he went to Berhampur University, then to IIT Kharagpur and then to other prominent universities abroad and eventually became NASA leader in new space discovery.
“Sahu’s march is a testament to sheer determination and hard work. He also epitomises the abundance of talent and capabilities among Odias to excel in the most specialised areas. For an instance, he has been called the Planet Hunter by astronomers across the world after he discovered 16 new planets in distant galaxy,” Patnaik further said.
The Chief Minister’s statement comes after a team of Space Telescope Science Institute (STScl) astronomers, led by Sahu, used the Hubble space telescope to measure the mass of a white dwarf star by analyzing how much it bent the light of a more distant star, just as Einstein asserted could be done more than a century ago.
The team reportedly observed a white dwarf star known as Stein 2051B located about 17 light years from the Earth just as it passed in front of a more distant star.
Sources said the researchers had to wait for a century to build a telescope that was powerful enough to detect the gravitational lensing phenomenon caused by a single star outside the solar system.
The amount of deflection is so small that only the ultra-sharply focused Hubble telescope could detect it.
In the new study, led by Sahu, two objects were slightly out of alignment, and an asymmetrical version of an Einstein ring was formed.
The closest star in the system was white dwarf Stein 2051 B, 18 light-years away.
Sahu's team measured shifts in the apparent position of a distant star as its light was deflected around Stein 2051 B on eight dates between October 2013 and October 2015.
They determined that Stein 2051 B – the sixth-closest white dwarf star to the Sun – has a mass that is about two-thirds that of the Sun.