Astrophysicist • Prof at @VanderbiltU • Director, Vanderbilt Lunar Labs • Work on black holes, gravitational waves, @LIGO • Forbes #30Under30 • PhD @GeorgiaTech
Nashville / Vadodara
Joined June 2011
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Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna (LILA): Advancing the U.S. Priorities in Gravitational-wave and Lunar Science
Very proud of our new paper out today. An early tribute to the 10th anniversary of the historic discovery of gravitational waves.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.11631
Karan Jani retweeted
New Report Identifies Four Moon Sites for Crewed Missions to Explore to Advance Scientific Discovery nasawatch.com/2026/10/21/nas… @TheNASciences @theNASEM @NASA @NASAMoonBase #Artemis
Karan Jani retweeted
“I have to emphasise how lucky I was because when we staffed this project everybody realised this was maybe a good idea, but very few thought it would work, including myself. So this was kind of an adventure where success was not guaranteed."
Francis Halzen – newly awarded physics laureate – explained that the success of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory was due partially to luck and to the talent of all his collaborators.
Back in the 1980s, Halzen realised that the Antarctic ice could be ideal for ensnaring enough of these secretive neutrinos that researchers could learn more about their distant origins. He quickly convinced many others of his idea’s potential and, in 1992, a group of tenacious researchers and engineers made the first attempts to lower light sensors into the glacier at the South Pole.
The breakthrough came around twenty years later: the IceCube neutrino telescope registered neutrinos with properties that convinced researchers they originated in distant regions of space. The hunt for the universe’s neutrino sources had begun in earnest.
ALT This image features Francis Halzen standing in front of a colourful background. The text on the left reads: "Francis Halzen, Nobel Prize in Physics 2026" and includes a quote: "Very few thought it would work, including myself.
Karan Jani retweeted
Backed by two new federal awards from @NASA and @NSF, @VUArtSci astrophysicist Karan Jani (@AstroKPJ) is leading an ambitious effort to turn the moon into a new window on the cosmos.
Learn more: vu.edu/dz7sk
Karan Jani retweeted
Today, NASA announced PRIMA, a new space telescope that will explore long-standing mysteries around the formation of planets, stars, black holes, and even how water on Earth came to be. go.nasa.gov/3TgGh3W
ALT An illustration of a telescope spacecraft with a parabolic mirror floating in deep space.
Karan Jani retweeted
This is fantastic work.
What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?
We trained a 5B LittleLearner model from scratch on LittleCurriculum, a corpus restricted to K–5 material, to make this question testable.🧵
💬 Chat with LittleLearner yourself: littlelearner-ll.github.io
Karan Jani retweeted
NASA has invited @ISRO to join its Moon Base program, deepening the U.S.-India deep space partnership! The news came as @StateDept and @NASA co-chaired the 9th Civil Space Joint Working Group in Bengaluru, advancing the 🇺🇸-🇮🇳 TRUST initiative.
The beauty and necessity of peer reviewed scientific work.
Although Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar himself had to contend with hostile referees in his early days, when he assumed a position of authority - as an Editor of the Astrophysical Journal - he used his power with generosity.
A very well known story (see link in thread below) concerns Eugene Parker's prediction of the existence of the solar plasma wind. Referees ridiculed and rejected the paper; Parker appealed to Chandra, who, not finding any technical mistake in the work, overruled the referee and had the paper published.
Within a few years of the theoretical prediction, the first satellites discovered the existence of the solar wind. Today NASA has a US$1.5 billion space mission named "Parker Probe" that is exploring the solar wind to understand it's origins, evolution and impact on Earth.
There is something personal for me at the end of this story separated by three decades.
Prof. Eugene Parker was the external thesis examiner for my PhD thesis "Modeling the Sun's Magnetic Cycle". He sent in his review neatly typed, a copy of which is one of my most cherished collections.
Karan Jani retweeted
Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
Karan Jani retweeted
A reminder to our media friends that 100% of the Apollo material released today has been public for decades. The "shocking" audio "released" from Apollo 17 is literally in a Daft Punk song. The document below is from the Apollo 11 technical crew debriefing, made public in 1977.
Karan Jani retweeted
Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.
I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
Karan Jani retweeted
Hello, Moon. It’s great to be back.
Here’s a taste of what the Artemis II astronauts photographed during their flight around the Moon. Check out more photos from the mission: nasa.gov/artemis-ii-multimed…
ALT A crescent Earth setting behind the Moon\u2019s horizon. Credit: NASA
ALT Earth setting behind the Moon as seen by the Artemis II crew. Over half the left side of the image is filled by the gray lunar surface, pocked with craters. Credit: NASA
ALT A close view of the Moon. Jagged circles of craters dot the gray surface, fading to dark on the left side of the image. Credit: NASA
ALT A crescent Earth setting behind a hemisphere of the Moon. Credit: NASA
Karan Jani retweeted
One last look at Earth before we reach the Moon.
This view of the Earth was captured on April 5, the fourth day of the Artemis II mission, from inside the Orion spacecraft. The four astronauts will reach their closest approach of the Moon tomorrow, April 6.
ALT Peering out one of the four windows near the display console on the Orion spacecraft, the Earth is illuminated by the blackness of space and grows smaller as the crew journeys closer to the Moon. This image was taken by an Artemis II crew member on the fourth day of the mission. Credit: NASA
Karan Jani retweeted
To build a sustained human presence on the Moon, we are building @NASAMoonBase, prioritizing surface operations and scalable infrastructure.
- Frequent robotic landings and mobility testing including MoonFall drones
- Starting in 2027 nearly monthly cadence of equipment and rovers with scientific payloads landing on the Moon.
- Investments in power, communications, and surface mobility
- Scalable infrastructure to support long-term human presence
The objective is clear: build the foundation for an enduring lunar base and take the next step toward Mars.
Karan Jani retweeted
Hugo Duminil-Copin, French mathematician and 2022 Field Medalist told me he never participated in math competition and was very bad at it.
Innovative mathematics requires creativity, intuition, intense concentration, and long reflections, sometimes spread over several years.
Good performance at a math olympiad merely tests fast problem solving abilities. AI can do that nowadays.
One of the big activities of a researcher, in mathematics and elsewhere, is not to answer questions but to ask the right questions.
Karan Jani retweeted
According to PowerOutage.com, as of 3:40 p.m. CT today:
- 985,035 TOTAL power outages in U.S.
- 316,661 power outages in Tennessee
- 206,387 power outages in Davidson Co.
@WKRN
New exciting result - entropy budget of the universe from merging black holes.
Work led by my former honors student @VanderbiltU and now PhD student at Harvard @CenterForAstro, Siyuan Chen.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.13621
