Joheen Chakraborty

About Me

I’m a second-year PhD student at MIT working in high-energy astrophysics. My advisor is Erin Kara, and I also work closely with Kevin Burdge and Riccardo Arcodia.

I studied astrophysics and computer science as an undergrad at Columbia, where I worked with Frits Paerels on X-ray astronomy and David Kipping on extrasolar planets, graduating in 2022. Before that, I grew up in suburban New Jersey. Here is a nice poem summarizing how I feel about my work.

Research Interests

High-energy astrophysics provides unique laboratories for questions in strong gravity, plasma physics, and atomic physics, which are all interesting topics to me. My research broadly studies compact object accretion and binaries across the mass scale to uncover insights in these areas. Currently I’m working on:

• Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs), a newly discovered type of recurring X-ray transient which may be the first-known electromagnetic counterparts to EMRIs
• Tidal Disruption Events, which are exciting high-energy systems to probe rapid accretion under strong gravity
• Ultracompact binaries, which are interesting as both low-frequency (mHz) gravitational wave sources and possible progenitors of Type Ia supernovae
• High performance computing; large-scale data analysis; X-ray astronomy

News

• [Jun. 2023] I gave an overview talk on QPEs at an IAS workshop
• [Mar. 2022] QPE discovery featured in a AAS Nova article!

Selected Publications

• Possible X-Ray Quasi-periodic Eruptions in a Tidal Disruption Event Candidate
  Joheen Chakraborty, Erin Kara, Megan Masterson, Margherita Giustini, Giovanni Miniutti, Richard Saxton
  Astrophysical Journal Letters, Nov. 2021.
  [PDF] [ADS]

• Testing EMRI models for Quasi-Periodic Eruptions with 3.5 years of monitoring eRO-QPE1
  Joheen Chakraborty, Riccardo Arcodia, Erin Kara, Giovanni Miniutti, Margherita Giustini, et al.
  Astrophyical Journal, Feb. 2024
  [PDF] [ADS]

• Transit Duration and Timing Variations from Binary Planets
  Joheen Chakraborty & David Kipping
  MNRAS, Feb. 2023.
  [PDF] [ADS]

Website last updated February 2024.