Colombian astronomer Juan Soler at the with the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope in Germany.
A Colombian astronomer has named what could be the largest known coherent object in our galaxy after Colombia's Magdelena river, made famous in the pages of "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Juan Diego Soler, a Colombian astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, and his colleagues announced in late October that they'd found a 3000 light-years-long "lane" of atomic hydrogen that Soler named "Magdelena" in honor of his home country's most culturally and economically important waterway
"It is the first time that I get to name an astronomical object," he said, "That river is the real heart of Colombia and I hope to remind all Colombians of what a fantastic treasure we have in our country."
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Soler, who studies the formation of stars, says the formation, part of a complex network of filamentary structures of atomic hydrogen gas, may be the distant cousin of the Radcliffe wave, another huge filament found earlier this year.
"I found a gas structure that links us to a galactic past, to a time beyond our human perception in size scales that challenge our imagination," he said, "If the people reading about this at home can feel challenged by the galaxy's immensity, they can also imagine how singular and precious our planet is and the conditions that have led our species to thrive."
Soler says in the same way that archaeologists reconstitute civilizations from the ruins of cities and Palaeontologists piece together ancient ecosystems from bones, his team is reconstructing Milky Way history using the clouds of atomic hydrogen gas.
"If you count all the gas in the galaxy that is cool enough to gravitationally collapse, the Milky Way should be forming 100 stars per year, but our best estimates indicate that only one star is formed every year... and we don't know why," he said, adding that this is an open mystery in astronomy.
Soler says this intricate web of gas was visualised by applying machine vision techniques to data from the THOR survey, conducted via the Karl Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio-telescope in Socorro, New Mexico.
“Galaxies are complex dynamical systems, and new clues are hard to obtain,” he said.
Soler was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. After studying physics at Universidad de los Andes and doing internships at the Jefferson Lab in the US and the CEADEN in Havana, Cuba.
"I study the accumulation of gas and dust that precedes star formation and I arrived to this topic after working in medical physics and doing instrumentation for telescopes that we flew with balloons from Antarctica to measure the interstellar magnetic fields and their effect on the galactic rates of star formation," he said.
Soler says that his project has been an international effort, involving researchers from multiple nationalities, including Latin Americans, with the next steps in Africa.
"The Square Kilometer Array is going to be the world's largest interferometer and Africa will play a crucial role, " he said, "We will be able to have an unprecedented resolution in the observations of the raw material to form stars and at the same time integrate a continent that has been usually absent from astronomical research."
"These are trying times for Colombians and all of the world inhabitants, so I know that people have more pressing issues, but I hope that I can inspire people to look further, to think of the world's complexity, and embrace it," he said. "We have huge problems as a species, and we won't solve them unless we recognize the talent that can be in any human being.
Atomic hydrogen emission from an excerpt from the THOR survey (top). The colors represent the ... [+]
Soler is another of a growing number of Latin American scientists based in Europe, many of them women, who are contributing to humanity's knowledge of what lies beyond our world.
Astrophysicist Kristhell Lopez, based in the Netherlands, who studies mysterious signals that might be mid-sized black holes, is one of just two female astrophysicists from Guatemala, a country with a long history of astronomy before Spanish colonization.
Andrea Guzman Mesa, also from Colombia and based in Switzerland, studies the atmospheres of planets far outside of our solar system.
Another Colombian astrophysicist, Valentina Abril Melgarejo, based at France’s Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, uses some of the biggest telescopes known to humanity to look back through time to when galaxies considerably reduced their production of stars.
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