Stars are the building blocks of the Universe and origin of life. The goal of this research group is to cover all phases of stellar physics from dust to life: creation, evolution and stars’ environment and their planetary systems. We aim to develope a multi-scale, multi-disciplinary approach to answer the following questions:
1 - How stars are formed?
2 - How their evolve in isolation? And in multiple systems? And as a population within our Galaxy?
3 - How their atmospheric activity impacts their environment and how this affects the habitability of exoplanets?
OUR CONTRIBUTION
Star formation: We study the process of star formation to understand how stellar clusters and galaxies form and evolve. With state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations we investigate interstellar turbulence and the origin of the mass distribution of stars and their formation rate. We constrain the theoretical models using radio-interferometric observations of protostellar cores, outflows and circumstellar disks.
Stellar evolution: We seek to constrain the evolution of single and multiple stellar systems (specially binary stars) by combining stellar evolution models with multi-wavelength datasets obtained by large astrophysical surveys, such as the Gaia Mission and state-of-the-art time-domain surveys (TESS, ZTF, BlackGEM). In particular, we focus on characterizing the evolution of binary systems and their planetary systems, and understanding their effect on larger scales, such as the contribution to ISM dust content, release of highly ionizing radiation, and the creation of gravitational wave progenitor sources.
Heliophysics and Stellar Environment: We study solar energetic particle (SEP) events in the heliosphere by using state-of-the-art models for the simulation of the solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and, for the acceleration and transport of SEPs. We study how complex solar wind structures (Corotating Interaction Regions, preceding CMEs and interacting CMEs) affect the acceleration and transport of SEPs to understand the measurements registered from different observing locations. We develop models for predicting the SEP radiation environment for the inner solar system. We also study the stellar activity (super-to-nanoflares) in M-dwarfs to infer its impact on the habitability of exoplanetary systems.
LINES OF RESEARCH
- Observational studies of star formation
- Observational studies of stellar evolution
- Analysis and modelling solar particle radiation, space-weather oriented predictions
- Observational studies of the impact of stellar activity (flares) over planetary atmospheres and habitability.
- Study of stellar astrophysical parameters with astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic datasets.
- Study of the different stellar populations within the Milky Way