A star in the constellation Sextans has been named after Bibha, which means ‘a light beam’, after Bibha Chowdhuri, a pioneering Indian scientist and also the first woman researcher-faculty at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1949.
Bibha is a yellow-white dwarf star located 340 light-years away. Bibha’s exoplanet has been named Santamasa, a Sanskrit word meaning “clouded”.
The Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced the names along with the names of 111 other sets of exoplanet and host stars.
Bibha Chowdhuri was one of the earliest particle and cosmic ray physicists in India who did not receive much attention. Somak Raychaudhury, Director, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics said, “Dr Bibha Chowdhuri discovered a new subatomic particle, the pi-meson, from experiments in Darjeeling, with her mentor DM Bose, and published her results in (journal) Nature, but did not get due recognition. Somebody else got the Nobel prize for a later discovery.”
Somak was part of the national committee that sent the final suggestions to the IAU. IAU is celebrating 100 years of its existence and organized IAU100 NameExoWorlds campaigns. It assigned every nation to come up with a name for one star and its exoplanet.
The star allotted to India was called HD 86081 and its exoplanet HD 86081b before a 20-year-old student at the Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, proposed to dedicate the star name to Bibha Chowdhuri. The name of the exoplanet was suggested by a 13-year-old Vidyasagar Daud from Singhad Spring Dale Public School.
