Sorya Lambert
Astrophysics PhD Student
Studying galaxies the way biologists study species,
building phylogenetic trees
Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos -IEA, Universidad Diego Portales
Santiago de Chile
Echoes of the past: Tracing the history of galaxies.
I am a PhD student at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile.
My research explores a curious, imaginative idea:
what if we could study galaxies the same way biologists study species, by building phylogenetic trees?
I will adapt this concept to galaxies using data from the SDSS-V Local Volume Mapper (LVM) hosted at Las Campanas Observatory.
I am a member of the SDSS-V collaboration and SOCHIAS, working alongside a community that loves
exploring the universe as much as imagining it.
Mission
Bringing stellar phylogenies into astronomy opens a new way to understand how generations of stars inherit, enrich, and shape the galaxies they live in. This perspective adds a fun interdisciplinary twist to galaxy evolution: galaxies aren’t just collections of stars; they’re living histories, filled with memories, carrying the echoes of their past.
Project
The heart of my thesis is to explore a new way of understanding how galaxies grow and evolve by applying interdisciplinary methods. Using integral-field spectroscopy, I aim to reconstruct the “family trees” of stellar populations. In biology, such trees trace evolutionary pathways, showing how species diverge and inherit traits over time. By analyzing the blended light of thousands of stars, we can trace their evolution, interactions, and chemical enrichment. This offers a new perspective on how stellar populations shape galaxy formation and evolution.