page_title: Vijay Kumar Kapahi
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Vijay Kumar Kapahi / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Centaurus A in radio, 24-micron infrared and X-ray.
context_page_description: Vijay Kumar Kapahi was an Indian astrophysicist and the director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, an autonomous division of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Known for his research on radio galaxies, quasars and observational cosmology, Kapahi was an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies – Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India – as well as of the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for his contributions to physical sciences in 1987.
context_section_description: Kapahi's work was mainly focused on observational cosmology and his work covered the studies of radio galaxies and quasars. During his doctoral studies under the guidance of Govind Swarup, together they developed an imaging technique for capturing rapid images of solar radio bursts and the details were published by way of an article, A simple image forming technique suitable for multifrequency observations of solar radio bursts in Solar Physics  journal in 1970. Through his studies with the help of Ooty Radio Telescope, he discovered for the first time in 1975 that radio galaxies were smaller in linear sizes during earlier cosmic epochs. He was one of the first astronomers to study Compact Steep‐Spectrum radio sources and he published a series of articles on the subject during 1981–98. These studies assisted in the later-day development of a paradigm known as unifying scheme of radio galaxies and quasers which explained the relativistic beaming in nuclear jets of quasars and in integrating the properties of lobe-dominated and core-dominated types of quasars. His work with Very-long-baseline interferometry telescopes helped discover hot spots on the twin-lobes of extragalactic radio sources as well as distant radio galaxies. His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and ResearchGate, an online article repository of scientific articles, has listed 101 of them. Besides, he edited five books including Quasars: proceedings of the 119th Symposium of the International Astronomical Union, Lectures on Observational Cosmology, Proceedings of the Workshop Diffuse Thermal and Relativistic Plasma in Galaxy Clusters and Asian-Pacific Astronomy: Proceedings of the 6th Asian- Pacific Regional Meeting on Astronomy of the International Astronomical Union. He also contributed chapters to books published by others and his work has drawn citations from other scientists.
  Kapahi was directly involved in the establishment of the Ooty Radio Telescope, especially in the development of phase-shifter array. Later, he was involved in the development and establishment of Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Pune which was the core theme of two of his articles published in 1991 and 1995 respectively. His contributions were reported in the initiation of the Joint Astronomy Programme of the Indian Institute of Science and he was associated with the Astronomical Society of India which he presided from 1997 until his death in 1999. He was also a member of the Indian Physics Association and International Astronomical Union and the doctoral scholars mentored by him included Joydeep Bagchi, Dhruba Jyoti Saikia, Prajval Shastri, C. H. Ishwar-Chandra and Ramana Athreya.
caption: False-colour image of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A.
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