Vijay Kumar Kapahi

Vijay Kumar Kapahi was an Indian astrophysicist who made significant contributions to the study of radio galaxies, quasars and observational cosmology. He was born on 21 January 1944 in Quetta, British Balochistan (now in Pakistan). He completed his pre-graduate and graduate studies at St. Joseph's College, Bangalore (then under Mysore University) in 1959 and 1962 respectively. He then moved to Mumbai where he did a one-year course at BARC Training School. In 1963, he joined the Radio Astronomy Group of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and worked with Govind Swarup, who would later design the Ooty Radio Telescope. He pursued his doctoral studies under Swarup's supervision and obtained his PhD from Bombay University in 1975 for his thesis on Angular structures of extragalactic radio sources and cosmology. He became a professor at TIFR and served as the director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, an autonomous division of TIFR, since 1994. Kapahi's research was mainly focused on observational cosmology and he investigated the properties and evolution of radio galaxies and quasars. He discovered a new class of compact steep-spectrum radio sources that have acquired a great deal of astrophysical importance. He also worked on the unification of the different properties of lobe-dominated and core-dominated quasars as arising from the aspect dependence of the effects of relativistic beaming in their nuclear jets. He also analysed the epoch dependence of asymmetries and misalignments in the extended structure of radio galaxies and quasars. Kapahi was an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies – Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India – as well as of the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences. He received several awards and honors for his research, such as the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (1987), the Vikram Sarabhai Research Award (1987) and the AAS Henri Chretien Research Grant Award (1991). He was also a member of the Astronomical Society of India (President, 1997-till death), International Astronomical Union and Indian Physics Association. Kapahi died of a heart attack at the age of 55 on 16 March 1999 in Mumbai. He is remembered as one of the pioneers and leaders of radio astronomy in India.