Dinesh Kabra

Congratulations to IIT Bombay team comprising George Christopher Panneer Selvam (Phd student) and Hari K (postdoctoral fellow) led by Prof. S. Shankaranarayanan, Physics for being awarded the first prize in the 77th Edition of Gravity Research Foundation (USA) essay competition-2026. Link: arxiv.org/pdf/2605.13042 This competition has a storied history dating back to 1949, with past winners including Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose. The Science: Can we "hear" the dark universe? For decades, the nature of Dark Matter - the invisible "glue" that holds galaxies together - has remained one of science’s greatest mysteries. A leading candidate is the "Primordial Black Hole" (PBH), a tiny relic left over from the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. While these black holes have the mass of an entire mountain range or a large asteroid (anywhere from 100 billion to 100 quadrillion tons), they are incredibly compact. An asteroid-mass black hole is smaller than a single atom, yet it carries the gravitational punch of a physical object hundreds of kilometers wide. However, because these black holes don’t emit light, they are nearly impossible to find. In this essay, we propose a new way to "see" the invisible. Our theory suggests that interstellar hydrogen gas can act as a "quantum sensor". When a asteroid-mass black hole passes through a cloud of hydrogen, its extreme gravitational curvature physically warps the atoms. This warping causes the hydrogen to absorb radio waves in a unique, complex pattern we call a "Gravitational Spectral Forest". By tuning next-generation radio telescopes to listen for this "forest", astronomers may finally be able to confirm the existence of primordial black holes, solving a 50-year-old mystery about the origin of our universe. This is only the second time in the history that a research group from an Indian Institution has received the first prize. First time was by late Prof. Padmanabhan in 2008. #Gravity #DarkMatter #BlackHoles #IITBombay #Physics #ANRF #ANRF_ARG #ANRF_CEO #QuantumSensing #Astrophysics #DST

Prof. Shireesh Kedare, Director of IIT Bombay, delivered the keynote address during The Economic Times TechEDU India Summit 2026 at NESCO, Mumbai on 26th February, 2026. From an academic lens, Prof Shireesh Kedare, Director, IIT Bombay, emphasised that digital transformation must transcend access and infrastructure to fundamentally reimagine pedagogy itself. While AI and digital tools can enable personalisation, contextualisation, and learning in Indian languages and dialects, he cautioned against surface-level integration. “We need to transform from teaching to learning… We should not just give information, but teach students how to learn,” he remarked. He further pointed to India’s deep tech opportunity, advocating structured pathways from research to incubation to patient capital, encouraging students to move beyond startup immediacy toward sustained, high-impact innovation.