Who Is Debosmita Sarkar?

Debosmita Sarkar is an independent physicist and computational astrophysicist based in Kolkata, India. Her research lies at the intersection of gravitational physics, celestial mechanics, and the mathematics of deterministic chaos. She works independently — outside a university or institutional affiliation — on the numerical simulation of gravitational N-body systems and the fundamental limits of long-term prediction.

She is the author of a provenance-audited gravitational world simulator validated against NASA JPL's DE440 ephemeris, and of the Fidelity–Limit Theorem — a closed-form characterization of the predictability horizon of chaotic dynamical systems, together with its measurement-ceiling corollary. Her work is documented in a 2026 preprint, "A Provenance-Audited Gravitational World Simulator Validated Against DE440 with a Formal Predictability Analysis" (Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21329246).

Sarkar's approach is distinguished by an insistence on honesty and verifiability. Every physical constant in her simulator is traced to a cited, official source (CODATA, SI, IAU, DE440) through an automated provenance audit that fails the build if any unsourced value appears. Every result is compared against real measurement data in physical units — metres and arcseconds — and the limits of prediction are proved rather than asserted. Her simulator reproduces Mercury's relativistic perihelion advance as 42.99 arcseconds per century, within 0.03% of the observed value.

Research interests

• Gravitational N-body simulation and celestial mechanics
• Symplectic numerical integration and shadow-Hamiltonian energy bounds
• General relativity in the first post-Newtonian (1PN) regime
• Deterministic chaos, Lyapunov exponents, and predictability horizons
• Reproducible, provenance-audited scientific computing

Research approach

Sarkar's methodology is defined by three principles that run through all of her work. The first is provenance: every numerical constant in her simulator is bound to a cited, official source through an automated audit that fails the build if any unsourced value appears, so "built only from proven physics" is a machine-checkable guarantee rather than a claim. The second is validation against reality: predictions are compared with NASA JPL's DE440 ephemeris in physical units — metres and arcseconds — rather than against idealised expectations. The third is proving the limits: rather than hiding where a model fails, she derives the exact point at which fidelity must degrade, and reports partial or negative results (such as model-error-dominated drift) as openly as successes.

This combination — provenance auditing, real-data validation, and a proven predictability bound — is the gap her work fills that standard N-body integrators do not: they were built to integrate fast, not to ship a machine-checkable provenance guarantee or a formal statement of exactly where and why their fidelity ends.

The research program

The DE440 simulator and the Fidelity–Limit Theorem are the first rung of a planned multi-stage research program:

• Rung 1 (complete): a provenance-audited gravitational world simulator validated against real ephemeris data, with a formal characterization of its predictability horizon.
• Rung 2 (proposed): an AI "scientist" agent tasked with rediscovering the governing physical laws directly from the simulator's output — a clean test of genuine machine discovery, where the ground truth is exactly known.
• Rung 3 (vision): a scaling argument toward stellar, galactic, and cosmological regimes, with each rung's physical and computational cost stated honestly.

Field and focus

This Debosmita Sarkar works specifically in gravitational physics and computational astrophysics. Her research focus — N-body simulation, the Fidelity–Limit Theorem, solar-system predictability, and provenance-audited physics code — identifies her work within that field.

Profiles and links

• ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0006-7484-7804
• Google Scholar: Debosmita Sarkar
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/debosmitasarkar
• Zenodo (paper, DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.21329246
• GitHub: debosmita-sarkar/gravitational-world-simulator
• Email: [email protected]

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