Manuel Aravena, academic and researcher at the Institute of Astrophysical Studies (IEA), within the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences at Universidad Diego Portales (UDP), and member of the Centro de Astrofísica y Tecnologías Afines (CATA) and the Millennium Nucleus of Galaxies (MINGAL), is one of the protagonists and principal investigators of the large-scale ALMA project, CRISTAL, an ambitious scientific initiative that has captured the most detailed image of the early universe to date.
Thanks to observations made from Chile with the ALMA radio telescope, and complemented by the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, an unprecedented portrait of the gas, dust, and stars in galaxies that formed when the universe was less than a billion years old was obtained.
“The CRISTAL project was born from pilot observations made with ALMA, which allowed us to study cold gas at high resolution in a small group of galaxies. Thanks to these initial data, we were able to consolidate a more ambitious proposal, which has yielded results such as new observations with the James Webb Space Telescope,” explains Aravena.
In addition to its scientific value, the project has contributed to the training of new generations of astronomers, giving rise to two doctoral theses (by Dr. Ana Posses and Dr. Manuel Solimano) and a postdoctoral research project by Dr. Kseniia Telikova, developed at UDP.
With the participation of more than 40 researchers worldwide, CRISTAL is the first large-scale ALMA project led from Chile. Its impact has been key to understanding how the first galactic structures in the universe emerged. Find out more at the following link: