Team members

Hello we are AstroLab! We're a team composed of astronomers, physicists, and electric engineers working side-by-side to undersand astronomical events from the long-wavelength radio regime to optical wavelengths. Our scientific interests are pulsars/millisecond pulsars, and fast transients, including fast radio bursts (FRBs). We are particularly interested in designing and building dedicated instruments to observe the millisecond transient regime. Our expertise ranges from radio instrumentation (bulding analog and digital components), data analysis (including big data), and scientific analyses from what we observe. Our team works directly with data/instrument from telescopes such as the Atacamam Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), 100-m Effelsberg, Candian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), and fast photon counters such as the Italian Quantum Eye (Iqueye + New Technology Telescope).

Cristóbal Braga. Astronomy undergraduate student at Universidad de Chile. Cristóbal's primary academic pursuits encompass radio astronomy and data science. With a specific focus on FRBs, he is engaged in the simulation of FRBs for both intensity and real-time data injections. Additionally, Cristóbal is learning to do targeted searches for repeating FRBs using data obtained from the 100-m Effelsberg telescope to be able to characterize and obtain physical information about them.

Prof. Tomás Cassanelli. Astronomer and tenure-track faculty at the Electrical Engineering Department, Universidad de Chile. Tomás completed his engineering degree at Universidad de La Frontera, MSc degree at the Universität Bonn, and PhD at University of Toronto. His interests are radio and optical transients such as: FRB repeaters and one-offs, and pulsar-like signals; long wavelength radio instrumentation (including local interferometers and very long baseline interferometry; VLBI) to observe and localize transients and fast photon counters (capable of detecting transient-like signals!) for medium to large apertures.

Constanza Espinoza. Astronomy undergraduate student at Universidad de Chile, supervised by Tomás Cassanelli and Marilyn Cruces (ESO; MPIfR). Connie's reserach focuses in repeating FRBs and how we can understand their activity window (actively collaborating with MPIfR and observing with the Effelsberg telescope). Their interests go beyond this particular project, to try to use FRBs as tools to study the matter content of the universe (intergalactic medium) and the use as cosmological probes.

Sebastián Manosalva. Electrical engineering graduate student at Universidad de Chile. Sebastián's primary interest lies in radio astronomy instrumentation, particularly in its application for FRB detection. Sebastián tehsis focuses in a complex radio frequency multiplexing system as part of a larger project aimed at detecting FRBs in Chile, CHARTS. Additionally, he is studying the properties of FRBs and fitting spectrs of FRBs using data from the CHIME/FRB Collaboration.

Pascual Marcone. Electrical engineering undergraduate student at Universidad de Chile. Although he is just recently learning the depths of astronomy, he is actively interested in many branches of electrical engineering and astronomy. As for now, he gravitates towards the world of astronomical instruments, focusing on their technical characteristics, both in software and hardware domains. Currently, Pascual is working in preliminary stages towards exploring counterparts for transient events (FRBs and Pulsars), mainly on optical bands with focus on detecting these with fast photon counters.

Vicente Peña. Electrical engineering graduate student at Universidad de Chile. Vicente's interests are optics systems from optical telescopes and millimeter/sub-millimeter radio dishes. He is currently working in a holographic method (to numericall retrieve the telescope aperture) at the APEX telescope in order to extract aberrations in the main dish and study its deformation against the telescope elevation. The application of this method involves a new orthonrmal base for the telescope aberrations in a specific software and performing a special kind of observations at APEX.