Two new young astronomers on their way

Ignacio Muñoz and Valentina Miranda successfully defended their master thesis in March 2026. Both of them come out with excellent works with interesting results to be published and already published.

Valentina started a new line of collaborations with observers to understand the star formation process in the early universe by envisaging a methodology to confront observations with simulations, soon to be sent to publication. Simulations offer the possibility to investigate hypothesis and navigate virtual universes to understand their impact and then define observables ,which can be confronted with observations to validate the initial assumptions.

The secrets of early universe are started to unfold and they challenge us to come up with more sophisticated methods to comprehend them. Valentina has been accepted to do a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

Ignacio studied the central regions of galaxies, how they formed and evolved. He searched for fossil records of their evolution in the chemical and kinematical properties of the stellar populations in the core of galaxies. First results are already published and show that, because the galactic cores host stars formed by different channels, their combined chemical abundances allow an estimation of how important the each channel is if we can built a more precise mass-metallicity relation for the bulges observationally. Ignacio will soon start his PhD at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Congratulations to both Valentina and Ignacio for such a commitment and hard work !