Aparna Bisht

"I was amazed as a 7-year-old how Saturn looked so similar to the one in my textbook when we visited the state observatory (ARIES, Nainital)! It was real and unreal at the same time. I was blessed to have been born in a hill station where the night skies are clear. Me and my brother often stood outside at night and had questions like "Is the universe really infinite? How can that be? There has to be an end, right? If something falls in outer space it will hit some 'ground'!" Then later I found my teen idol in Kalpana Chawla, the Indian astronaut. There was something about the cosmos that made me calm and excited. Years later when I took the first course in general relativity and the idea of a 4D continuum was discussed I was nervous because I really did not understand it. Finally when I got to GEO 600 as a graduate student and saw the giant experiment that was needed to detect the tiny distortions of spacetime, I was so sure that cannot really happen! It's this excitement of really being part of something never done before that keeps me excited!"


Aparna Bisht is a PhD student at AEI Hannover originally from Nainital, India who does experimental work on GEO 600. In her free time she likes to read non-fiction, run through Georgengarten, and keep aww-ing over pictures of Golden Retrievers on the internet. You can follow her on Twitter at @Aparna20174158.

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