Research

My aim

From the Big-Bang to the dark ages, the physical evolution of the Universe is well understood through theories. However, with the birth of the first stars and galaxies, all the neutral baryonic material begins to ionize until the entire Universe became hot in what is called the "Epoch of Reionization". There are several efforts to explain both observationally and theoretically how the Universe got ionized, but still there is no agreement on this topic. There seems to be a source or a mechanism of ionization that we are missing, hiding the secret of the Reionization Era. My goal is to unveil this secret through extensive studies on observations of early galaxies.

Past research

I investigated properties of high redshift galaxies through local analogs. Local analogs are relatively young, nearby galaxies whose conditions resemble those in the early Universe. These are widely studied to unveil the behavior of distant galaxies since, in principle, they exhibit the same physical processes. There are several types of local analogs. In this case, I studied nearby SDSS star-forming galaxies selected to assimilate galaxies at z ~ 2.3 to disentangle the relations between strong emission line ratios and metallicity. These relations have a huge scatter in literature and are quite uncertain when applied to high redshift galaxies. My study is an effort to shed light into those relations using high quality data gathered with the optical Magellan/MagE spectrograph at Las Campanas Observatory.