Pía Cortés-Zuleta
Lideró el hallazgo de una superTierra a 3,5 pársecs, en uno de los sistemas estelares más cercanos que existen.
Finding a planet around a Sun-like star is already hard. Around a red dwarf it is worse: they are small, cool, spotted stars, and those spots produce an instrumental signal that looks a great deal like a planet that is not there.
In January 2025, Cortés-Zuleta was first author —of thirty-seven— on the paper announcing Gl 725A b: a super-Earth in one of the closest known stellar systems, 3.5 parsecs from the Sun.
Telling a planet from a starspot
The method she used does not measure the planet: it measures the star. An orbiting planet tugs gravitationally on its star and makes it wobble, and that wobble shifts the lines of the stellar spectrum towards blue and towards red, over and over, with the period of the orbit.
The trouble is that a spot on the surface of a rotating star produces almost the same thing: a periodic shift. Decades of exoplanet announcements around red dwarfs have been withdrawn for exactly this reason.
The way out is to observe in two wavelength ranges at once. A signal produced by stellar activity changes size depending on the colour you look in; one produced by a planet does not: the wobble is the same in visible and in infrared light. That is the role of the two instruments in the paper's title — SOPHIE in the optical and SPIRou in the infrared— and it is what turns a suspicion into a detection.
A super-Earth at 3.5 parsecs
Gl 725A b orbits one of the two stars of a red-dwarf binary among the closest to the Sun. The mass measured by this method is always a minimum —it depends on the orbital inclination, which is unknown— and that is why the paper calls it a "potential" super-Earth, with that caution written into the title.
She has said she has taken part in the discovery of more than thirty planets outside the solar system. This is the one where she comes first.
From Santiago to Scotland, by way of Marseille
She trained at Universidad de Chile —a bachelor's and a master's in astronomy— and took her doctorate at Aix-Marseille Université in France. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland.
In January 2026 it was announced that she would receive the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award for the UK and Ireland, in Physical Sciences.
And how it is known
She is first author, of 37, on "Gl 725A b: A potential super-Earth detected with SOPHIE and SPIRou in an M dwarf binary system at 3.5 pc", Astronomy & Astrophysics 693, A164 (2025).
Verified against Crossref (DOI 10.1051/0004-6361/202451646), the publisher's own record.
She trained at Universidad de Chile, took her doctorate at Aix-Marseille Université and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St Andrews.
Agrees between the Universidad de Chile release and the St Andrews research portal.
She has taken part in the discovery of more than thirty extrasolar planets.
This is her own statement, reported in the press. It was not checked against a publication list.
The exact edition year of the UK L'Oréal-UNESCO award.
The Chilean press covered it in January 2026 and calls it "2026"; the British programme usually presents in London late in the preceding year. It could not be confirmed at the official source, so this page says when it was announced rather than which year the award carries. No source gives a verifiable date of birth either, which is why this entry states no age.
- Astronomy & Astrophysics — el paper (DOI). Cortés-Zuleta et al., «Gl 725A b: A potential super-Earth detected with SOPHIE and SPIRou in an M dwarf binary system at 3.5 pc», A&A 693, A164 (2025). Primera autora de 37.
View source → - Universidad de Chile. Comunicado de su casa de estudios sobre el reconocimiento británico.
View source → - St Andrews — portal de investigación. Registro institucional del paper en la universidad donde trabaja.
View source → - El Periodista — perfil. Entrevista con reporteo propio, no derivada de ningún comunicado.
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Pía Cortés-Zuleta — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/pia-cortes-zuleta
@misc{fisicaeterna_pia_cortes_zuleta,
author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Pía Cortés-Zuleta — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/pia-cortes-zuleta},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}