New Delhi: India registered a stellar performance at the 15th International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) – an annual competition for upper-secondary level students – with its students winning three gold and two silver medals by finishing third in the tournament.
209 students, including five students from India, participated in the event held in Kutaisi, Georgia from August 14 to 21. The participants included 37 main and 6 guest teams.
Each country may send a team to the Olympiad by depositing a registration fee. There is also an option to send guest teams for a little extra payment.
In the medal tally, India and Singapore jointly finished third behind the visiting team of Iran, who finished second with four gold medals and one silver. The official team of the West Asian country snatched the first place in the competition with five gold medals.
The medal winners for India at the Olympiad were: Raghav Goel (Gold), Mohammad Sahil Akhtar (Gold), Mehul Borad (Gold), Malay Kedia (Silver) and Atharva Nilesh Mahajan (Silver).
Gold medalist Raghav Goyal also won a special award for scoring the highest marks in a question that required the participants to work on the dynamics of co-orbiting satellites. The question was considered as the most challenging theoretical question in the competition.
The Indian crew was accompanied by two professors Sarita Vig (Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram) and Ajit Mohan Srivastava (Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar). It also included two scientific supervisors – an additional team of experts who corroborate questions, evaluate answer scripts and give advice to students. The support staff included Dr Sriharsha Tendulkar (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai), a gold medalist at the International Astronomy Olympiad in 2002 and 2003.
“The curriculum of such Olympiads is usually not very well defined. But the level of difficulty is usually very challenging – higher than the board, for that matter, or other competitive exams,” Anvesh Majumdar, national coordinator of Science Olympiads told ThePrint.
In this year’s competition, theoretical papers covered topics such as circumbinary planets, mechanics of co-orbiting satellites, accretion around compact objects, Dyson spheres, protoplanetary disks, expansion of nebulae, and relativistic beaming.
The data analysis component of the competition contained questions related to gravitational waves and galaxy clusters. This section – where students are given numerical data to analyze and draw conclusions – is unique to the Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad and is not asked in other subjects.
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