About me

I am a master's student in Astronomy at the Department of Astronomy (DAS) of Universidad de Chile. I do research in galaxy evolution, but I am particularly interested in the physics of galaxies at the first billion years from the Big-Bang. I like video games, board games, music, some sports, to meet new people and to visit new places!

I am also part of the SOCHIAS Whitelist for availability to apply to observing time to the Chilean Telescope Allocation Committee CNTAC and the possibility to use telescopes at ESO, Las Campanas and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Besides, I am affiliated to the Center for Astrophysics and Associated Tecnologies (CATA), a Chilean center for research, outreach, and tecnology transfer in astronomy & astrophysics. I'm a huge enthusiastic outside academy. I like teaching, and I have been involved in several public outreach activities. We have a tremendous amount of knowledge waiting to be shared with people. Non communicated science is not science!

What I like above almost everything is to spend time with my three little cats. I used to have dogs also, and althought they are not with me anymore, they were a fundamental part of my life. Therefore, I decided to include a space for these cuties here below.

Do it for them

Mao

This cat recieves his name because he meows extremely loud, and when he does, it sounds more like "mao" than "meow".

Peluche

Peluche is the spanish for teddy. This cat is so beautiful, soft and cuddly that we decided to give her that name.

Pirata

We adopted this poor cat in our house. She missed an eye, like a pirate, that's why she is called "Pirata". We love her so much.

In memoriam

Lucky

Lucky arrived a few years after Cacique. He was a funny poodle, quite happy and always excited to play with humans. The word exhausted did not exists in his vocabulary.

Cacique

Cacique is the name that the Spanish conquerors gave to the local leaders of indigenous communities. This is the first dog I have memory of adopting.

My aim

From the Big-Bang to the dark ages, the physical evolution of the Universe is well understood through theories. However, with the birth of the first stars and galaxies, all the neutral baryonic material begins to ionize until the entire Universe became hot in what is called the "Epoch of Reionization".

There are several efforts to explain both observationally and theoretically how the Universe got ionized, but still there is no agreement on this topic. There seems to be a source or a mechanism of ionization that we are missing, hiding the secret of the Reionization Era. My goal is to unveil this secret through extensive studies on observations of early galaxies.

Current Research

I am currently investigating the properties of high redshift galaxies through local analogs. Local analogs are relatively young, nearby galaxies whose conditions resemble the early Universe. These are widely studied to unveil the behavior of distant galaxies since, in principle, they should present a similar laboratory.

There are several types of local analogs. In this particular case, I am studying nearby SDSS star-forming galaxies selected to assimilate galaxies at z ~ 2.3 to disentangle the relations between strong emission line ratios and metallicity. These relations have a huge scatter in literature and are quite uncertain when applied to high redshift galaxies. My study is an effort to shed light into those relations using high quality data gathered with the optical Magellan/MagE spectrograph at Las Campanas Observatory.