Concepción, 11 September 2019

Dr. Ronald Mennickent Cid delivered lecture at Harvard University

Dr. Ronald Mennickent, academic at the Department of Astronomy and Director of Research and Artistic Creation, was invited to give a lecture at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 9 September.

The academic visited Harvard to deliver a lecture on his research into mass exchange processes in binary stars, their evolution, and accretion disc activity. This work was carried out under the Fondecyt Regular Project No. 1190621, recently awarded to Dr. Mennickent.

During the event, Dr. Mennickent received valuable feedback from Dr. Selma de Mink and two of her PhD students, who are currently developing stellar evolution models for progenitors of gravitational wave sources.

The host at Harvard was academic Dimitar Sasselov, who was Dr. Mennickent’s supervisor during his postdoctoral visit in 1998/99. In 2002, Sasselov led the team that discovered what was then the most distant known planet in the Milky Way, whose light takes five thousand years to reach Earth.

Moreover, Sasselov is the director of the Harvard's Origins of Life initiative, an interdisciplinary research programme in astrobiology. As part of his work, he travels around the globe with his students to collect in situ samples of geological sediments at Earth's primitive stage, which allows them to study extremophiles - microorganism potentially adapted to life in conditions similar to those on other planets. The academics Mennickent and Sasselov discussed the possibility of the University of Concepcion hosting a future visit to the Atacama Desert. This motivated by the unique conditions the region offfers for studying organisms adapted to extreme environments. It would also encourage cross-disciplinary research between astronomy, geology, biology, and other field at our institution, in the emerging field of astrobiology, where the involvement of professionals from different disciplines is key.