AAS Names Enrique López Rodríguez as Fred Kavli Plenary Lecturer for 238th Meeting

PRESS RELEASE

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With support from the Kavli Foundation, the Vice-Presidents of the American Astronomical Society invite a distinguished scientist to kick off each semiannual AAS meeting with a presentation on recent research of great importance. At the 238th AAS meeting, to be held virtually in June 2021, the Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture will be given by Enrique López Rodríguez, who just started a new position as Research Scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University.

Before relocating to KIPAC, López Rodríguez served as Instrument Scientist for the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera Plus (HAWC+) at the SOFIA Science Center on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. SOFIA is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a modified 747SP airliner carrying a 2.7-meter (106-inch) telescope. López Rodríguez has been using HAWC+, a far-infrared camera and imaging polarimeter aboard SOFIA, to study the evolution of galaxies. He is being honored with the Kavli lecture for his pioneering work on extragalactic magnetic fields using infrared polarization. His most compelling results demonstrate that magnetic fields are modified by inflows and outflows in starbursts and active galaxies as well as by galactic mergers. Collectively, his work provides new insights on the amplification and effect of magnetic fields across cosmic time.

Cosmic magnetic fields are difficult to detect directly. But they can cause interstellar dust grains to become aligned, which polarizes the grains’ infrared emissions. Water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs this radiation, so ground-based telescopes can’t see it. But with SOFIA flying above 99% of that water vapor, HAWC+ can map the dust’s polarized emission and thus the direction and intensity of the magnetic field. López Rodríguez is a leader in the use of this technique to study magnetic fields in the interstellar material permeating nearby galaxies. His results include the quantification of the strength and orientation of the magnetic field in the superwind of starburst galaxy Messier 82, the discovery of a warped magnetic field in the peculiar active galaxy Centaurus A, and support for the predictions of spiral density wave theory in Seyfert galaxy NGC 1068.

López Rodríguez earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands, Spain, in 2008, followed by his PhD at the University of Florida in 2013. He next worked as an assistant professor of research at the University of Texas, San Antonio, then as a research fellow at UT Austin and a visiting postdoctoral scientist at the SOFIA Science Center before his appointment as Instrument Scientist for HAWC+. He has also held visiting research positions at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

SOFIA is an 80/20 partnership of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The aircraft is based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California. The SOFIA Program Office is at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, which manages SOFIA's science and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) in Columbia, Maryland, and the Deutsches SOFIA Institut (DSI, German SOFIA Institute) at the University of Stuttgart.