UDP Cosmic Dust Laboratory

Figure 1: The Bruker Vertex 80V Spectrometer, the main equipment of our Cosmic Dust Laboratory. 

The UDP Cosmic Dust Laboratory is one of the few facilities in Chile focused on experimental astrophysics.  The infrastructure includes office space and a large sample preparation area, in addition to the  room housing a top-of-the-line Bruker Vertex 80V spectrometer (see Fig. 1), which we use to perform absorbance spectroscopy of meteorites (the building blocks of the Solar System) and pure minerals to support planet-formation applications (see Fig. 2) and thesis projects in our PhD program.  The work at the UDP Cosmic Dust Laboratory is highly interdisciplinary in nature and currently includes the participation of  Prof. Lucas Cieza (astronomer), Prof. Roberto Lavin (experimental physicists), and PhD student Grace Batalla (geologist).

Protoplanetary disks are sites of ongoing planet formation, analogous to the Solar Nebula that gave origin to our own Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. These disks are  natural laboratories to study planet building, which is a very complex process that involves the growth of submicron-sized dust particles onto large, differentiated bodies that are thousands of km across. Protoplanetary disks are now routinely studied with the most powerful telescopes in the world and in space, like ALMA, the VLT, and JWST.  Dust particles are the dominant source of opacity at IR and (sub)millimeter wavelengths and are therefore the main observable of IR instruments like VLTI-MATTISSE, VLT-VISIR, TAO-MIMIZUKU and JWST-MIRI and (sub)telescopes such as ALMA (see. Fig. 3). 

Figure 2: IR absorbance spectroscopy of some of the meteorites studied in our laboratory (L and LL-type Ordinary Chondrites). The peaks from different minerals (Olivine, Pyroxen and Plagioclase) are indicated. Image from Batalla-Falcon, Cieza, Lavin et al. 2025, A&A, 696, 66.