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PhD student Manuel Solimano gets a paper accepted in A&A!

Galaxies are cooking on gas. More specifically, the molecular gas in galaxies is the fuel for star formation, so measuring how much of it was present in the high-redshift universe is an important step for understanding galaxy evolution. In his first first-author paper, our PhD student Manuel Solimano investigated the molecular gas content of four star-forming galaxies using the combined power of the Atacama Compact Array and nature’s own telescopes: gravitational lenses. In this way, he was able to measure gas masses down to 10^9  solar masses, reaching the regime of “normal” intermediate-mass galaxies. He found that these sources appear to have less gas than expected by the trends established by large surveys of massive galaxies. He concludes that either these trends do not longer apply at these lower masses or the tracers used to infer the gas mass are more affected by metallicity than previously thought. This work was carried out in collaboration with UDP post-doctoral researcher Jorge González-López and UDP faculty member Manuel Aravena, among others. The paper is now accepted for publication at A&A and has been anounced on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09769. A video discussing the details of the research was uploaded to YouTube