Chemical complexity in the interstellar medium and star formation group

I graduated in Physics from Universidad de Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in 2019. I obtained the Master's Degree in Astrophysics at the same university. During 2020-2021, I worked in the CARMENES (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs) project researching magnetic fields and stellar activity of M-dwarfs stars in which i have a paper in preparation.

Currently, I am a PhD Student at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA under the supervision of Dr. Víctor M. Rivilla. My PhD thesis is based on the idea that stars and planets are born within dense regions of molecular clouds, which are composed of interstellar dust and a rich chemical reservoir of molecules. Some of these molecules have a high prebiotic interest, and they could have been delivered through meteorites and comets that were formed in the parental molecular cloud of our Solar System. In this context, it is crucial to understand: Are these molecules inherited by Solar-System bodies? Are these molecules present in different regions of our Galaxy or other galaxies? How similar/different is the chemical reservoir in different phases of a Solar System formation (molecular clouds, high- and low-mass star-forming regions, protoplanetary disk and planets)? The main goal is to address these questions by performing a comparative study of the molecular abundances of the full chemical content (tens of molecules) between these phases and environments. This work is under the COOL (Comics Origins of Life) project (PI: Víctor M. Rivilla).

To answer these questions I have conducted a research entitled 'The GUAPOS project. V: The chemical ingredients of a massive stellar protocluster in the making' which is inside the GUAPOS project (G31.41+0.31 Unbiased ALMA sPectral Observational Survey) devoted to study G31.41+0.31 with ALMA. This work has been pubished in MNRAS (López-Gallifa et al. 2024). In this work, we analyze the molecular inventory of the high-mass star-forming region G31.41+0.31 in detail and we compare it with three more sources: a low-mass star-forming region (IRAS 16293-2422 B) and two comets (67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and 46P/Wirtanen). Resulting that the oxygen- and nitrogen- bearing species have quite similar molecular abundance ratios in all sources, and that the sulfur- and phosphorous- bearing species are more abundant in comets. This could be because the sulfur and phosphorous are trapped on the icy grains of protostars while they are easily desorbed into the gas phase in comets.