Clàudia Soriano, the weather woman from distant worlds who wants to return to Catalonia

BarcelonaSo that everyone understands her when she talks about her work, the Catalan astrophysicist Clàudia Soriano (Esplugues, 1997) says that she is a weather woman for distant worlds. The point is that she investigates the atmosphere of exoplanets –those that are outside our Solar System and orbit a star other than the Sun– through simulations that allow her to understand what happens in the gaseous layer that surrounds these planets that are thousands of light-years away from her laboratory. Since she was very young, she has had a great fascination for space and distant galaxies, and now she has become one of the young voices with the most projection in Europe in the field of space research. She currently works there from the University of Southampton, where she is doing her postdoctoral fellowship, but she does not hide the fact that she is looking forward to being able to do research from Catalonia when she finishes her stage in the United Kingdom.

Soriano studied for her degree in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and when she was in her third year of her degree, she did an external internship with the university's radiation group. A year later, she joined the Institute of Space Sciences to do a second internship and did her final degree project (TFG) on the charged Higgs boson at the Institute for High Energy Physics. With her degree under her belt, Soriano did her master's degree in astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology at the University of Barcelona (UB).

Studying 'Hot Jupiters'

Although the usual path after a master's degree is to go abroad, Soriano received a very good proposal from the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) to continue her training. She opted to do her doctorate here, with the Imagine research group, and focused it on a type of exoplanets called Hot Jupiters. More specifically on their atmosphere. In the last 30 years, about 6,000 exoplanets have been discovered, although there are still millions more to be discovered, which can be classified into four large groups.

These are terrestrial ones, like Earth or Mars; super-Earths, which are quite similar to terrestrial ones but much larger; Neptunes, which as their name suggests are similar to the composition of Neptune, and, finally, gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn. Her research focused on subtypes of this last group that have the peculiarity of being very close to their star, and are calledHot Jupiters. "They are very hot planets that have very turbulent, very dynamic atmospheres with very intense winds," explains Soriano.

It had not even been a week since she had defended her thesis and Soriano was already catching a flight to the United Kingdom to start her postdoctoral research. Now she has broadened the focus of her research and not only studies the effects that occur in the atmospheres of Hot Jupiters, but also investigates the changes in the gas layer of all exoplanets. She does this at the University of Southampton with the Oasis space research group and, although she is very satisfied, she explains that in the future she would like to continue her research in Catalonia.