Last Thursday April the 11th, the Brazilian astronomer became the sixth graduate of the doctoral program taught by the Institute of Astrophysical Studies of the Diego Portales University.
04/18/2024
“An mm and near-IR study of YSOS: from outbursting protostars to satellites”, is the title of the doctoral thesis of Pedro Henrique Nogueira, whose supervising professors were Alice Zurlo and Lucas Cieza, and whose objective was to study the mechanisms of star and planetary formation, through the analysis of two very young systems.
It is to this research area that Pedro Henrique Nogueira’s doctoral thesis contributes, making him the sixth graduate of the program taught by the Institute of Astrophysical Studies of the Diego Portales University last Thursday, April the 11th. The defense committee was composed of the aforementioned UDP academics, Alice Zurlo and Lucas Cieza, and the external members, Dr. Dary Ruiz-Rodríguez (NRAO, USA), Dr. Anthony Boccaletti (Paris Observatory, France) and Dr. Michael Meyer (University of Michigan, USA).
The work of Nogueira, who also holds an undergraduate degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a master’s degree in Astronomy from the National Observatory of that country, analyzed two newly formed binary systems. The first of them is a binary system where one or both stars are of the “eruptive” type, where they are still in a phase in which they accrete mass and have explosive and violent episodes periodically. The second is a system formed by a massive star that has a companion with a mass of 50 times the mass of Jupiter, called a brown dwarf.
“The most significant contribution of this work is the knowledge of what is the most probable formation channel of these two systems and of all the intrinsic properties (for example, orbit of the objects) that could be extracted from the data,” says the advising professor, and researcher at the IEA UDP, Alice Zurlo.
Regarding this last point, Zurlo delves into the fact that one of the most complex things is data analysis, since for both projects the nature of the data is very different. “Pedro had to learn to reduce and analyze interferometry data from the ALMA observatory and high-contrast image data from the VLT observatory, in optical light.”
The professor concludes by referring to why it is important to research this area: “Despite the large number of exoplanets that we have found so far, more than 5500, it is still not known how the different planetary systems have formed. That is why it is important to try to study ‘newborn’ systems in order to understand what the most probable formation mechanisms are.”
After defending his thesis, Pedro Henrique Nogueira is listed as the sixth graduate of the UDP Doctorate in Astrophysics, after Trystan Lambert, Danielle De Brito Silva, Ana Posses, Dejene Zewdie and Kriti Gupta.