Ana Escorza
Astronomer - La Caixa Junior Leader Fellow
About Me
I am a Spanish professional astronomer currently working at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with a Junior Leader Fellowship from La Caixa Foundation. Before returning to Spain, I spent three years in Santiago de Chile, where I worked as a European Southern Observatory (ESO) fellow with duties in the Paranal Observatory.
I defended my PhD in Astronomy in Belgium in 2020, as part of a dual PhD programme between KU Leuven and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. My research focuses on low- and intermediate-mass evolved stars and binary systems. I am very passionate about my work and science in general. I love observing, and I really enjoy teaching and talking about science to all kinds of audiences.
Explore this site to learn more about my current projects, my past publications, and all the public outreach events I am involved in.
Most recent first-author publications
The main focus of my research concerns different products of binary interaction involving red giant stars.
Below you can find a short description of my most recent first-author publications.
The masses of the white-dwarf companions of barium and related stars.
A. Escorza and R. J. De Rosa, March 2023
In this paper, we presented the absolute masses of a sample of optically invisible white dwarfs thanks to the powerful combination of archival radial velocities and Hipparcos and Gaia astrometry. These white dwarfs interacted with their binary companions in the past, when they were puffy Asymptotic Giant Branch stars, and polluted them with heavy metals. Their current masses are important constraints to understanding how the two stars interacted using binary evolution models and how evolved stars make heavy metals using nucleosynthesis models.
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