Padrón Campus Duo Publishes Paper In Astrophysics Space Science Journal

Angel Jose Ventura Lopez’s curiosity was his gateway into the world of science. 

He grew up reading fantasy, adventure and astronomy books in Cuba, eventually developing a fervor for physics, mathematics and computer science.

But the prospects for thriving in those fields were dim in his homeland. So in 2012, he immigrated to the United States. 

Today, the 30-year-old is studying computer science at Eduardo J Padrón Campus while exploring the passions of his youth at Miami Dade College’s School of Science STEM Research Institute.

In January, Ventura and Adolfo L.Mendez, an associate professor in the math and natural sciences department at Padrón Campus, published a research paper in the Astrophysics and Space Science Journal titled Periodic-chaotic alternating regimes during a fast solar metric-radio pulsation event.  

The 10-page paper, which took approximately ten months to research and write, examines the behaviors of pulsations in the solar corona, the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere.

“It’s like tuning into a radio frequency,” Ventura said. “For example, the radio frequency of 94.5 or 94.6 FM. At different frequencies you hear a different radio wave. In the solar corona, [pulsations reach] different heights that have different frequencies. With a radio telescope, you can listen to those radio waves and characterize the process that is occurring.”

Ventura first heard of the project while applying for the School of Science’s 2023 summer research program. 

In the program, students list a topic they want to research and a faculty member they prefer to be paired with. 

Ventura, who has taken nearly all the courses Mendez teaches at the College, including astronomy, basic physics and physics with calculus I and II, picked his 60-year-old mentor.   

Mendez, who was born in Cuba and has dedicated more than 25 years of his life to studying solar astrophysics, accepted.

Rather than conducting research from scratch, the astronomy junkies analyzed data from Mendez’ personal library, which has decades’ worth of information that he collected while researching at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste in Italy.

Ventura assisted Mendez by ordering thousands of data points in Excel, inputting them into a software that uses complex mathematical computations to process the data, and analyzing the results. 

He also provided feedback and proofread the first and second drafts of the research paper, which Mendez wrote. 

Although Ventura is a full-time student who serves as the manager of Ventura Jewelry, his brother’s business, he was able to fully commit to the project.

“For me the most important achievement was Angel working with me. It was amazing,” said Mendez, whose inquisitive mind has led him to publish between 25 to 30 research papers throughout his career. “Every time that [you] publish a paper and the paper comes to life, it’s amazing. It’s like a new son or a new daughter.”

In October, the astrophiles presented the preliminary results of their research at the STEM + Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Research Symposium at North Campus. 

The team submitted the final version of the paper to Astrophysics and Space Science Journal in late December. It was published on Jan. 23. 

“I couldn’t believe it,” Ventura remembers thinking when he received an email letting him know the project would be published. “I thought, ‘Wow. It’s incredible that I, a guy who came from Cuba that never thought he would be able to study in the United States, was able to achieve his dream.’ And of course, I owe a lot of that to professor Mendez.” 

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