Arianna Di Cintio, researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and professor at the University of La Laguna, was awarded yesterday Monday, March 11, at the awards gala held for the Institutional Day of the University of La Laguna. The award corresponds to the junior category, referring to research personnel born after 1984, recognizing the quality of research at the scientific and social level and for its particular value and interest in the socioeconomic environment, its social repercussion and international impact.
Di Cintio is an Italian researcher specialized in galaxy formation with a BSc and MSc in Astrophysics from the Sapienza University of Rome. She started working at the IAC following the granting of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship Program, which helps outstanding female students in innovation to further their development in research and training. Since then she has published more than 50 articles in high-impact scientific journals. Among others, she has shown that satellite galaxies could still form stars when they pass close to host galaxies or evidence for a high number of ultradiffuse galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood.
She started her path in astrophysics working with the gravitational wave hunters LIGO and Virgo. She has received many distinctions throughout her career, such as "Best thesis in experimental astrophysics 2010" or Cum Laude qualification and "extraordinary doctoral thesis" in her PhD on galaxy simulations analysis. She currently combines her work as a researcher with her teaching at the ULL, where she also coordinates the subject Extragalactic Physics and the research group ACT-Astrophysics and Theoretical Cosmology. Since December 2023, she has been a tenured professor at the university and academic director of the Astrophysics master's program.
Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
An international team led by researchers based in Poland, Spain, and Germany, has predicted the probable existence of a large number of ultradiffuse galaxies in the Local Group which still have not been observed. These galaxies would have masses of up to a thousand million solar masses, spread out over an area comparable to the size of the Milky Way, which is a thousand times more massive. This would make them very faint and difficult to observe, which is why they have not been seen until now. Only af ew have been found in the Local Group, and the question has been raised of how many could
