The astrophysicist Eva Villaver: "The world belongs to the people who are willing to explore it"

VALENCIA, May 3. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The astrophysicist Eva Villaver assures that she encourages the girls to follow the path of science, since "there are billions of galaxies and in each galaxy there are billions of stars and, to discover and study them all, we need many minds and a lot of technology ".

"If your passion, like mine, is the universe, I encourage you to study a STEM career because, although people tell you that it is difficult, if you put passion and desire into it, the path to achieve it will be much closer. The world is one of people who are willing to explore it.

This has been asserted by Villaver, who has become a new female benchmark for Aquae STEM. The Aquae Foundation, the Hidraqua Foundation, has organized, on the occasion of the International Day of Girls in Information and Communication Technologies, a new webinar in which 1,300 students from 22 educational centers have participated.

Villaver began his professional career at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias where he completed his doctoral thesis. She joined the NASA Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute in 2001 and three years later she was hired by the European Space Agency.

Since 2009 she has been working as a professor of Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid where she combines teaching with research, focusing on how some of the most common stars are going out and how this phenomenon is affecting planetary systems like Earth.

During her speech from Baltimore (United States), from where the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes are operated, and where Eva has been holding meetings at NASA for the last two weeks, she focused on what astrophysics is currently studying and the Important advances have been made in this field in recent years.

"Our investigations go far beyond our solar system. We have found a great diversity of worlds, planets of water, ice, so hot that they are evaporating and even planets where it rains iron. Twenty years ago we did not even know that these planets existed and now we can even see them," he assured.

"Today - he continued - we are searching the universe for planets like ours, which have stars that allow life, just as we have the sun, a star that still has fuel for 4,500 million years. So we shouldn't worry about this star. The biggest threat to our planet is humans, but we are also part of the solution."

The astrophysicist has concluded her webinar indicating that most of the universe is made up of matter and dark energy and we still don't know what it is.

So she has encouraged all the students who have participated in this session to "opt for STEM training that allows us to continue learning about what is out there".

With this webinar, the cycle of virtual meetings with leading women in STEM for the 2022-2023 academic year ends, in which the mathematician Belén Rosado, the drone pilot, Sonia García and the cable company Isabel Alcober have participated.

Likewise, on June 8, World Oceans Day, the Aquae Foundation will organize the traditional Aquae STEM awards in order to value the best practices carried out by the educational centers that participate in Aquae STEM.