Nicolás Sandoval-Garrido
Encontró los canales por donde un cúmulo de estrellas en formación se alimenta desde afuera, y con eso una pista de cómo se ensambla.
The intuitive picture of how a star cluster is born is a cloud of gas contracting onto itself until it lights up. It is the one the diagrams teach, and it is incomplete.
Observing a massive protocluster called G351.77 with ALMA, Sandoval-Garrido and his team found V-shaped gas structures that work as channels: they bring it material from its surroundings. The cluster does not only contract — it feeds.
A gas that only shines where it is already squeezed
The work is part of ALMA-IMF, a large programme observing regions of massive star formation to understand why stars are born with the masses they have. He signs chapter XVIII.
What was observed is not gas in general but one specific molecule, N₂H⁺, and the choice is not incidental: that molecule is destroyed in the presence of gaseous carbon monoxide, so it only survives where the gas is so cold and so dense that CO has frozen onto dust grains. Put another way, N₂H⁺ is a natural filter that makes visible exactly the part of the cloud that is about to collapse, and leaves the rest invisible.
V-shaped channels, and only in the young regions
From measurements of the collapse rates and the total gas mass, we infer that the protocluster is continuously fed with gas from its surroundings, which suggests it assembles from the outside in.
Nicolás Sandoval-Garrido, in Cooperativa Ciencia, translated from Spanish
The detail that turns the observation into an argument is where those structures appear. As he explained, they show up in the young regions and not in the more evolved ones — which is what you would expect if they were part of the assembly mechanism and not a permanent feature of the landscape.
A cluster with plumbing, not a deflating balloon
If a cluster feeds from outside while it collapses, then the amount of gas available is not whatever was there at the start: more keeps arriving. That changes the arithmetic of how long star formation will last there, and how much mass the stars now assembling will reach.
It is a piece of the oldest puzzle in star formation: why the universe produces many small stars and few large ones, in a proportion that repeats in very different places.
And how it is known
He is first author of "ALMA-IMF XVIII: The assembly of a star cluster", Astronomy & Astrophysics 696, A202 (2025).
Verified against Crossref (DOI 10.1051/0004-6361/202452589). The DOI with a "-24" suffix that appeared in some sources does not exist: that is the file name on the journal's site.
The preprint is open on arXiv (2410.09843), with the full list of 23 authors.
It is the source that lets anyone check the authorship order without paying for access.
He is a doctoral student at Universidad de Concepción and a researcher at CATA.
Agrees between his university's note and press coverage. No source says which year of his doctorate he is in, and none gives a date of birth: which is why this entry states no age.
The study's figures —relative N₂H⁺ abundance and mass accretion rate— appear in the preprint abstract.
They were not transcribed here because they could not be read directly from the published article. Anyone who wants the detail has it in the linked arXiv entry.
- Astronomy & Astrophysics — el paper (DOI). Sandoval-Garrido et al., «ALMA-IMF XVIII: The assembly of a star cluster», A&A 696, A202 (2025). Primer autor de 23.
View source → - arXiv — preprint abierto. Versión de acceso libre del mismo trabajo, con la lista completa de autores.
View source → - Universidad de Concepción. Nota de su propia universidad sobre el hallazgo.
View source → - Cooperativa Ciencia. Con declaraciones suyas explicando el resultado.
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Nicolás Sandoval-Garrido — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/nicolas-sandoval-garrido
@misc{fisicaeterna_nicolas_sandoval_garrido,
author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Nicolás Sandoval-Garrido — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/nicolas-sandoval-garrido},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}