Rango Astronomy | English
Channel: Arvind Gupta
Date: 2016-07-21

I am Amit Kumar Tamrakar, from couple of weeks I am staying here at IUCAA as a visiting student. Daily I used to come to the library to study. In front of the library these two huge banyan trees attracts me. Because, the interesting fact is that these trees are much older than the building of IUCAA.

While constructing the IUCAA building, the IUCAA founding members thought this building can be constructed without cutting these trees and, in addition, these can be used to show a very important concept of binary stars.

If we imagine these trees as two stars in the space, then we can easily explain the concept of binary star system and its roche lobe, with the help of this famous roche lobe garden of IUCAA.

When I got opportunity to make rangoli at IUCAA, naturally I selected these trees as my object, by thinking why not combining astronomy with rangoli art.

To make this rangoli art I have used ordinary rangoli which is easily available in the market and to apply different shades in the rangoli I have mixed different colours in certain ratio and applied into the rangoli art. To complete this rangoli art it took me around 17 to 18 hours.

Here each tree represents a single star which is orbiting around each other through a common center. Every star has its own gravitational field around it. In a binary star system their gravitational field gets affected by each other’s gravitational field and make a combined gravitational field, which is called the roche lobe, within which orbiting material is gravitationally bound to that star, where at the centre of the two stars gravity cancels.

To show this binary star concept, I tried to make the landscape of roche lobe garden of IUCAA in my rangoli art. Black strip surrounding the trees is the common envelope of roche lobe.

I tried to connect the traditional rangoli art with the science by making such a beautiful concept of binary star.

Thank you.. TATA Trust: Education is one of the key focus areas for Tata Trusts, aiming towards enabling access of quality education to the underprivileged population in India. To facilitate quality in teaching and learning of Science education through workshops, capacity building and resource creation, Tata Trusts have been supporting Muktangan Vigyan Shodhika (MVS), IUCAA's Children’s Science Centre, since inception. To know more about other initiatives of Tata Trusts, please visit www.tatatrusts.org