The astrophysicist Kristhell López, which studies mysterious signals that can simply be medium-sized black holes, is one of Guatemala’s two female astrophysics, a country with a long history of astronomy before Spanish colonization.
Lopez, originally from Guatemala City and now founded in the Netherlands, says the purpose of the assignment she entrusted her phD to was to get to the bottom of the true nature of ULX’s deep area signals (ultra-luminous X-ray sources).
“The goal of the task is to estimate its mass, as its nature is yet to be confirmed. To do this, we conducted a NIR (near-infrared) examination of all ULX located up to a distance of 10 Mpc (mega-parsec) from our Galaxy, hoping to identify whether they were accretion curtains (i. e. “feeding”) from an RSG star (red supergigant) “, he said, adding that the assignment was born 8 years ago and had been carried out through it.
Lopez says ULXes are attractive because they can turn out to be middle-mass black holes.
“It’s very important!” She said, adding that while astronomers have evidence of black star mass holes between five and 20 times the mass of our sun and supermassive black holes in the middle of galaxies, in more than a million solar masses, evidence of medium-sized black holes has been scarce.
In September, a team that added Richard Udall and Karan Jani, another strategy called gravitational wave measurement, published an article featuring what Jani says is the first evidence to date of medium-sized black holes.
Lopez said examining ULX is one of the first tactics to look for black holes of intermediate mass, except that the true nature of ULX is still unknown.
Lopez says his time in astronomy began right in the afternoon sky.
“I constantly observe the stars and think about how beautiful they are, how much they look like diamonds. . . He hypnotized me,” he says.
López says that studies in astrophysics were presented at any level, so he did his undergraduate studies in physics at the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala and then received a full scholarship to examine a master’s degree in astrophysics in Austria.
Lopez, also one of the organizers of guatemala’s first convention on archaeological astronomy, focused on how the country’s Mayan ancestors saw the sky/universe influenced the expansion of their civilization. Maya texts from the precolonial era show a complicated understanding of astronomy.
He said the convention was organized in reaction to widespread confidence that the global would end in 2012 as the Maya “predicted. “
“We seek to demystify the myth of the end of the world,” he said, “we invite astronomers and foreign archaeologists to give lectures, seminars and workshops on astronomy and archaeology. “
Even after entering and completing his doctorate at the SRON Institute in the Netherlands, Lopez continued to face challenges, as the Covid-19 pandemic earned him the ability to protect his doctorate from his kitchen, Zoom.
Her successful defense in April 2020 means she is now the first Guatemalan astrophysicist to do her undergraduate studies in Guatemala.
“I can tell you that I know how much it means for a person of color to be represented in any field,” he said, “I had no one to admire. “
“We are 7 Guatemalan astrophysicists in total, in the history of the country and 2 we are women!!”
Guatemalan astrophysicist is the first in the country, Tanya Urrutia, who finished her undergraduate studies in Germany.
“I didn’t meet Tanya until I got my PhD,” Lopez said, adding that it meant I only had male role models.
Representation in astronomy is not only a challenge in Guatemala: in Colombia, a developing organization of astrophysical women joined a platform called CHIA (Colombians Doing Research in @AstroChia Astrosciences), named after the goddess of the Moon, in the Chibcha language, which once spoken through muisca, an ancient civilization that once inhabited the central mountain range of what is now fashionable in Colombia.
One of the co-founders of chiA is Colombian astrophysicist Valentina Abril Melgarejo, who uses some of humanity’s known telescopes to retreat in time when galaxies drastically reduced their star production.
Another co-founder of CHIA is Andrea Guzman Mesa, also from Colombia, with the preference to stick to a bachelor’s degree in fashion languages, but now she is a PhD student in astrophysics at the University of Bern, reading the atmospheres of the planets away from our solar system. .
I am an Australian science journalist in Medellín, Colombia since 2014, southern countries face the greatest clinical challenges in the world: sustainable development.