Juan Diego Soler: "Every year 100 stars should be formed, but only one is being born"

The first thing Colombian astrophysicist Juan Diego Soler (Bogotá, 40 years old) did when he finished writing his book

was to go to the Paris cemetery and leave a flower on the grave of Rear Admiral Jules Sébastien Dumont d'Urville, a 19th-century French explorer famous for his voyages to Antarctica.

Dumont d'Urville's expeditions fueled Soler's childhood obsession with the South Pole and served as a compass for him to write the book.

"I don't think there is life after death," explains Soler, "but I went to the rear admiral's tomb and said 'thank you'."

In the book, recently published by

Penguin Random House, Soler intersperses the memories and findings of his doctoral research trip to Antarctica in 2010 with decisive historical events and figures to understand the complexity of an inhospitable place, inhabited by seals, whales and penguins, which is home to 70% of the world's freshwater reserves.

"I wrote this book to tell my daughter about my adventures in Antarctica and to help make sure that no one forgets what men like d'Urville did for science."

Most of the chapters of

begin with epigraphs by Rimbaud, Novalis and Pessoa, but the poem that summarizes the book is by the Japanese Haruki Murakami, Soler explains and begins to recite from memory: “It is difficult to find the difference between the sea and the sky / between the traveler and the sea / Between reality and the works of the heart”.

Soler worked for many years at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, and is now part of the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, Italy.

Question:

What did you feel when you arrived in Antarctica?

Answer:

I felt as if a vacuum cleaner was taking away all the humidity that was in the room.

As soon as I got off the military plane we were on, my skin became very tense, after three hours the corners of my lips, eyes, ears were dry... Everything was dry.

Q.

As if it were in an arid place?

A.

Yes, Antarctica is an ice desert.

It is drier than the Sahara.

P.

Despite the cold and snow.

R.

In Antarctica, the snow does not have the consistency that one imagines, with which you can make balls or dolls.

Its texture is more similar to that of sand.

I was also impressed that there is no green and that it doesn't smell like anything.

It is an absolutely aseptic territory.

Suddenly, there is a strong smell like fish: the penguins are arriving.

But they leave and everything smells like nothing again.

However, I think that the feeling of the absence of humidity is what encapsulates the alienness of this place.

Q:

When and why did you go there?

A:

I arrived in September 2010 to do my doctoral research work in Astrophysics, which consisted of designing, building and sending a balloon telescope into space.

I returned in mid-December, to spend Christmas with what is now my wife.

Q.

What was the purpose of that balloon telescope?

A.

The telescope we made sought to observe and measure the light that cannot pass through the Earth's atmosphere, infrared light.

Before stars go through nuclear reactions and produce enough energy for us to see them in visible light, there are clumps of gas that glow but are only visible in infrared.

So if you want to tell the story of how a star was born, you have to look at those frequencies of light.

Q.

There are telescopes like the Alma, in Chile, or the James Webb, in space, that also detect infrared light, how was yours different?

A.

We were trying to capture the dust and gas in the early stages of star formation.

We wanted to see the origin, the birth, the genesis of the stars.

We were looking for clues to solve one of the biggest problems in astronomy today: star formation.

We still don't have a theory that can explain how they are born.

The stars we observed were roughly 1,500 light-years from us.

In astronomical distances, that is right here, very close to the earth.

That's why the telescope didn't have to be so big.

Q.

What is the problem in star formation?

R.

If you take all the gas that the galaxy has and do the calculations of how many stars should be forming each year, it would give you about 100, but in reality only one star is being born per year.

Why aren't they forming more efficiently?

That was the question we wanted to answer.

Q.

And what did they find?

A.

We found that the gas that forms the stars is magnetized, that is, it cannot move freely wherever it wants, but rather has specific privileged directions in space.

We think that's what's stopping star formation.

In a nutshell, we discovered that the magnetic field, apart from being essential for life on Earth, also plays a determining role in the early stages of star formation.

However, many open questions remain.

Q.

What was the globe they made for the telescope like?

A.

It was a balloon filled with Helium, made with the same plastic material with which sandwiches are wrapped.

When the balloon takes off, it inflates only a tenth, but when it goes 40 kilometers high it expands to the size of a football field.

It was huge, it had a million liters of expanded Helium.

Q.

Why did you decide to write the book?

A.

Do you remember a scene in Harry Potter where Dumbledore has a jar in which he puts his thoughts to rest his head?

That's what I did with the book.

It is a book that I have been writing in my mind for 10 years, thinking about what I did not want to forget.

Q.

What anecdote do you remember?

A.

I remember the first time I saw the seals peeking out from the little holes in the ice.

There is something very unique when you see a wild animal, you feel that another brain is looking at you.

What I felt when I saw those seals was that there was a thinking mind behind it that was looking at me and was processing the fact that I was there.

It wasn't just me looking, they were looking at me with almost the same curiosity.