Astronomer
Álvaro Ribas
I’m an astronomer in the Astronomy Unit at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), where I study protoplanetary disks — the rotating disks of gas and dust around young stars, and the birthplaces of planets.
My work combines large samples, observations spanning from the optical to the radio, and a good amount of statistics and machine learning to work with large, heterogeneous datasets with the goal of better understanding how planets form.
Much of it relies on radio interferometry with ALMA and the VLA, which resolves the fine structure of disks — rings, gaps, cavities, and asymmetries — that traces planets in the making. In addition, I also work with large samples and physical models, and combine them through statistics and machine learning methods (neural networks and Bayesian analysis) to characterize their properties.
I’ve been a Research Associate at QMUL since 2025. Before that I was a Research Associate at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge (2022–2025), an ESO/ALMA Fellow in Chile with duties at the ALMA observatory (2018–2022), and a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University (2015–2018). I completed my PhD in 2015 at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC).
Selected work
A forming gas giant in MP Mus
ALMA and Gaia data point to a young gas giant shaping the disk around MP Mus, along with substructures that only become visible at longer wavelengths.
A&A Highlight · 2020Neural-network modelling of disk SEDs
Artificial neural networks trained on radiative-transfer models, used to fit disk spectra for large samples and to revisit how disk masses are estimated.
ApJ · MNRASLong-lived disks in multiple systems
The disk around the quadruple system HD 98800, resolved with the VLA, and later evidence for large dust grains and a possible dust trap in its polar ring.
Disk populationsProtoplanetary disk lifetimes
How quickly disks disperse across nearby star-forming regions, and how that dispersal depends on stellar mass.