Star bonanza: Kailash Sahu (above) and his hunting ground, the Milky Way

A star-struck Oriya lad is going great guns at America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). Born in 1955 in tribal-dominated Ganjam district’s Bellagam village, a remote hamlet where electricity was then still to make its presence felt, Kailash Sahu has seen it all on his way to becoming Nasa’s leading planet hunter. Recently, Sahu hit the headlines when he and his team of researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, discovered a record 16 planets outside the solar system in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The study appeared in the October 5 issue of the journal Nature.

These planets, 0.8 times to 1.4 times the size of Jupiter, orbit stars some 26,000 light years away — which means that light from these stars take 26,000 years to reach the earth-based telescope. “No group has so far spotted planets in such far away parts of the galaxy,” says an elated Sahu. Till date, astronomers have discovered 180 extra-solar planets, but they are all located at less than 500 light years from the sun. More importantly, this is the largest number of planets ever found from a single set of observations.

His accomplishments notwithstanding, Sahu humbly admits that the ambience in his village triggered an interest in astronomy. Like most Indian villages in the 1950s and 1960s, Bellagam did not have electricity. “Since there was absolutely no light pollution, the night sky was stunningly beautiful. My father had the habit of sitting down in our veranda after dinner, under the clear, dark, night sky. As a young boy, I would often sit with him and listen to him describing the positions of various stars and how they changed during the course of the year.”

Sahu says he was enthralled by it all. “I was fascinated by the grandeur and beauty of the night sky. The fascination continues undiminished even today,” he says.

Sahu went to school in the village itself — by the time he was 12 Bellagam got its electric wires — and completed his masters degree in physics from Berhampur University in Orissa. Though he enrolled in a doctoral programme in peizo electricity (the generation of electric by squeezing certain crystals) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, he dumped it midway for professional star gazing. “I happened to attend an astronomy summer school in Bangalore organised by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. That is when I was introduced to the subject of astronomy, and immediately fell in love with it,” he recalls.

He did not lose any more time in deciding to pursue his first love. He took up a position at the Ahmedabad-based Physical Research Laboratory and enrolled in a Phd programme in astronomy from Gujarat University. “But I was quite disappointed with the facilities for observational astronomy available in India at that time,” says Sahu, explaining his decision to leave the country for further research. Armed with a PhD, he left for Groningen in the Netherlands. From there he went to France five years later, before landing up at the Institute of Astrophysics in Canary Islands, Spain. This was where he had his first brush with fame. In a paper published in Nature in 1994, Sahu took on some of the giants in the field by disproving their claim of finding proof for elusive “dark matter”, which makes up most of the universe.

Two formidable scientific groups, from the US and France, had earlier published two independent papers arguing that the flashing of distant stars implied that the matter is swarming around the visible disk of the Milky Way in a huge halo of dark chunks, which occasionally pass between the stars and ground-based telescopes.

Sahu, however, made some calculations and showed that the observed phenomenon could be more naturally explained as the movement of normal stars in the Magellanic clouds (nearby dwarf galaxies), and that no dark matter had been detected.

“My interpretation was first rubbished by many groups but subsequent observations proved that my reading was indeed correct,” says Sahu.

So how significant is the present discovery? “We already knew that about five per cent of stars have Jovian planets (major planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). These planets have very large masses and are farther from the stars than the terrestrial planets orbiting them. We, however, did not know whether we could confidently extend the theory to the entire galaxy. Our study focused on a different and distant part of the galaxy that is close to the galactic bulge. Even there we found that planets are just as abundant,” says Sahu.

This demonstrates that actually billions of planets may exist throughout the galaxy. “There is a good chance that some planets would be earth-like and some even have habitable conditions,” Sahu believes.

He adds that 15 years ago, nobody knew whether our solar system was unique, or whether other stars also have planetary systems. But till date, more than 200 planets — including the 16 by Sahu’s team — have been discovered around other stars.

Sahu recently became a US citizen along with his astronomer wife, Meenaskhi, and daughter, Mita, who joined Johns Hopkins University for graduate studies this academic year. He has two brothers — Subas, who still lives in his ancestral village, and Bijaya, who has moved to neighbouring small town of Berhampur.

But for Sahu, his real hero is his father. “He started life as a poor farmer and grew on to be one of the most respected men in his village. He had a broad outlook and gave much importance to education. He worked hard for the welfare of the village,” Sahu says with pride.

So does he miss India? “India is my favourite country in the world. And someday, I hope to return,” says the Nasa researcher.