Indian team secures four gold and one silver medal at 19th International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics

Key facts

• India won four gold and one silver medal at the 19th International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA), held in Hanoi, Vietnam, from September 25 to October 5.
• Pranjal Dixit (Hyderabad), Sumant Gupta (Delhi), Akshat Srivastava (Gurugram) and Arnav Sehrawat (Faridabad) won gold medals, while Harshil Amitkumar Patel (Vadodara) won silver.
• With four golds, India finished third jointly with Vietnam in the medals tally, behind Iran and South Korea, which won five gold medals each.
• The competition featured 307 students from 64 countries, making it the largest IOAA in terms of participating countries and students.
• The IOAA comprised theory, observation and data analysis components accounting for 50, 25 and 25 per cent respectively.
• For the first time since 1999, every Indian student across the five senior-level Olympiads — Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Astronomy — won a gold or silver medal, with 16 golds and 8 silvers among 24 students.
• The Indian team was accompanied by Prof Bhaswati Mookerjea of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, and Prof Sanved Kolekar of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, while Prof Aniket Sule of HBCSE-TIFR attended as IOAA president.