VIJAYAWADA: SRM University-AP hosted Phy-Spark 3.0, featuring Stars, Scopes, and Spacetime, on Sunday as an outreach initiative for school students.
The day-long programme combined lectures, experiments, demonstrations, and interactive sessions to introduce young students to physics and astrophysics.
A public lecture by Dr Shivaraj Kandhasamy, scientist at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, on the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, was the programme’s highlight. Dr Kandhasamy explained how gravity shapes spacetime, introduced the concept of gravitational waves, and discussed the historic Michelson-Morley experiment. He also outlined the design and functioning of LIGO and landmark detections from black hole mergers and binary neutron star collisions.
Faculty members Gangireddy Salla, Ashmita Das, and Krishna Prasad Maity from SRM AP’s Department of Physics delivered academic sessions on telescope fundamentals, binary star systems, and the general theory of relativity. The lectures were followed by lab visits, live demonstrations of telescopes, binary star experiments using LED bulbs, and a Michelson interferometer, as well as an interactive Q&A session for hands-on learning.
The programme aimed to ignite interest in physics among school students and make complex concepts accessible, giving participants a glimpse of how physics is applied in real-world research environments.