Madrid’s youngster Alex Benítez has joined a team that plans to observe the galaxy MACS0647–JD thanks to his computer skills, reports The country.
Tiny, “He was interested in computers”, highlighted The country. And when he was barely 12 years old, he began to learn to program on his own. Alex Benítez, a young 17-year-old student from Madrid, has since caught on: he is “The only high school student” to have joined the James Webb Telescope Cycle 1 General Observers Program, launched on December 25, 2021.
Last summer, Alex Benítez indeed obtained the coordinates of Dan Coe, researcher of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the operating center of the Hubble telescope and of his successor James Webb. According to the Spanish daily, the scientist is piloting a project to observe the galaxy MACS0647–JD, in which the young Madrilenian was invited to collaborate.
This galaxy is one of the oldest, “Or the youngest according to the point of view of the universe”, Explain The country. It has already been observed using Hubble, but the new telescope should allow us to know much better, explained Benítez daily:
Our project is to determine exactly its composition, and, if possible, […] to observe other even older galaxies surrounding it. ”
For this project to be validated, astronomers used a computer program simulating what James Webb “Would see by observing a specific part of the sky”. A recent program, some errors of which were corrected by Alex Benítez:
What I did was read the program a bunch of times, to figure it out and make it work with Dan Coe’s help. In the end, it’s a very complicated program that requires knowing a lot of things about telescopes and stars. ”
Coe then proposed to the young Spaniard to continue to collaborate with the team, in particular for the processing of the data which will begin to arrive in the fall of 2022.
Alex Benítez has since started studying physics at the Complutense University in Madrid a year earlier. A material that always has more “Because it allows mathematics to be applied to the real world”, as he explained to El Pais: “You keep your feet on the ground.” Which does not prevent you from having your head in the stars.
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