The Museum of Science and the Cosmos (MCC), part of the Autonomous Organization of Museums and Centers of the Cabildo of Tenerife, will host the second session of the scientific outreach series “From the Sky to the Thesis” on Thursday, September 25, at 4:30 p.m. The series is organized in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC).
The initiative, promoted by doctoral students from the IAC, seeks to bring the main topics of research in astrophysics closer to the public, told in the first person by those who develop them. Each monthly session includes two short talks by young researchers. Admission is free until full capacity is reached.
This edition will feature the lectures “Galactic Archaeology: How the Ages of Stars Reveal the Past of Our Galaxy” by David Mirabal Betancort, and “Worlds Beyond the Sun: From Gas and Dust to Endless Planets” by Samuel Geraldía González.
How to decipher the past of the Milky Way
The Milky Way, our galaxy, hides a history marked by episodes as diverse as its birth among clouds of primordial gas, collisions with other galaxies, and periods of intense star formation. Each stage has left traces that can still be read today in the stars, authentic “cosmic fossils” that preserve the memory of these processes. In this talk, David Mirabal Betancort, a doctoral student at the IAC, will guide us on a journey through almost 14 billion years to reconstruct the evolution of the Milky Way, using stellar ages as fundamental clues.
Mirabal studied a Bachelor's Degree in Physics and a Master's Degree in Astrophysics at the ULL and is currently researching the formation and evolution of the Milky Way as part of the ChronoGal project, which uses data from the Gaia satellite to reveal the history of our galaxy in unprecedented detail. This project has made it possible to characterize the history of star formation in different components of the Milky Way, bringing us closer to understanding how the galactic disk was formed and what role cosmic collisions played in its evolution.
The diversity of exoplanets
In just three decades, we have gone from knowing only the planets in our solar system to discovering thousands of worlds orbiting other stars. These exoplanets, formed from disks of gas and dust around young stars, have transformed our view of the cosmos and raised new questions about the diversity and habitability of these worlds.
The lecture by Samuel Geraldía González, also a doctoral student at the IAC, will cover the process of planet formation from its earliest traces in protoplanetary disks to its final configuration. He will explain the most commonly used detection techniques—such as radial velocity and transit—and will focus on so-called water worlds, planets rich in water that could offer clues about the existence of life beyond Earth.
Geraldía graduated in Physics and completed a Master's Degree in Astrophysics at the University of La Laguna (ULL), where she worked on projects involving observation and data analysis for space missions such as TESS and CoRoT, successfully identifying and characterizing new exoplanets. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Enric Pallé and Gaia Lacedelli, focusing on the study of planetary systems using radial velocity and transit techniques, with a special interest in sub-Neptunian planets, a type that is rare in our solar system but abundant in the galaxy.
