“Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS)” is the title of the project led by both specialists from the UDP Institute of Astrophysical Studies.
The research project “Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons” (YEMS for its acronym in English) has successfully renewed its funding until the end of 2027; it is led by Alice Zurlo and Lucas Cieza, academics at the Institute of Astrophysical Studies (IEA) of the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences at the Diego Portales University.
YEMS is a multidisciplinary project that uses computer science and artificial intelligence in particular, to support astronomical research. As its name indicates, this research has as its scientific objective, the detection and characterization of young exoplanets and exomoons to answer the long-standing question about their diversity and formation.
Its principal investigators are Alice Zurlo (director) and Lucas Cieza, both from the UDP, in addition to the astronomer Sebastián Pérez (alternate director), from USACH, the astrochemist Viviana Guzmán from the PUC, and the computer scientist Cecilia Hernández, from the University of Concepción. This is a project that started at the beginning of 2022, and was just renewed for 3 more years until the end of 2027, in the most recent Millennium Nuclei Competition for Natural and Exact Sciences of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID).
In its first three years, YEMS has already made significant contributions explains Professor Lucas Cieza, including “the first observational evidence of a planetary formation mechanism known as ‘Gravitational Instability’, according to which giant planets can form very quickly (in astronomical terms), through the fragmentation of spiral arms in a protoplanetary disk (the gas and dust disk that gives rise to a planetary system).
In the same way, adds the IEA UDP specialist, in its initial stage YEMS has collected evidence of a possible ‘moon’ around a planet outside the solar system, the only object of this type known so far. “From the renewal of YEMS, we hope to be able to confirm these high-impact results using more detailed observations,” Cieza continues.
“In addition, YEMS has developed artificial intelligence tools to be able to determine the properties of protoplanetary disks much more quickly than the traditional method, using observations from the ALMA telescope. In the coming years we plan to use these tools to analyze large amounts of data stored in the ALMA observational archive,” he adds.
Finally, when asked about the importance of this project and its recent renewal, Professor Lucas Cieza comments that “personally it is very gratifying, since the Millennium initiative has been very valuable for the development of the Institute of Astrophysical Studies (IEA). At its beginning, a decade ago, the UDP Astronomy group hired several of its first postdoctoral researchers thanks to the MAD Millennium Nucleus. One of the researchers hired at that time was Alice Zurlo, currently an academic at the IEA and director of YEMS,” he says.
“The alternate director of YEMS, Sebastián Pérez, was also a postdoctoral researcher at MAD and today is a prominent academic at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CIRAS) at USACH. This shows how important a Millennium Nucleus can be to boost the scientific careers of young researchers,” he concludes.
Learn more about the “YEMS” Millennium Nucleus at the following link: https://youngexoplanets.github.io/index-es.html