Hello there!

(If you think I’m a Star Wars fan, you’d be absolutely right. And if you responded to the above with “General Kenobi”, here’s a high-five!)

I am a VITA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. I study high velocity astrophysical outflows and work on devising new numerical techniques to overcome the challenges associated with modeling such outflows. For example, jets from the center of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are launched at a scale of tens or hundreds of Astronomical Units (AUs) and continue upto several hundred kiloparsecs (an expansion of more than 10,000,000 times!). Traditional finite-volume methods would require extremely high resolutions to capture features of the outflow at such large dynamic ranges, which is prohitively expensive, especially in three dimensions. I developed a novel hydro code called Sprout that can expand its computational domain following the fluid flow, thus providing a cheap way to study outflows that grow over several orders of magnitude in space and time. I also model remnants of supernova explosions using Sprout and find ways to extract information about the progenitor system from high resolution images, thanks to modern facilities like the Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope.

I received my PhD degree from Purdue University, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Duffell (read more about the Paul Duffell Research Group here!).

When I’m not working, I’m usually busy cooking, stargazing, playing badminton, or hanging out with Bayek or Kratos on my gaming console. I hail from the metropolitan city of Kolkata (lovingly called the ‘City of Joy’) in the coastal state of West Bengal, India. So expect a lot of pescatarian recipes and crazy city tales from me!

#Contact information

Dr. Soham Mandal

Department of Astronomy

University of Virginia

530 McCormick Avenue

Charlottesville, VA 22901, USA

Email: soham@virginia.edu