Enrique Garcia-Berro Montilla Dec2013 IEEC

Enrique García-Berro Montilla (1959 - 2017) was a Spanish and

Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...

astrophysicist. He was a world-recognized expert in

stellar astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the hea ...

, in particular in the theory of

white dwarf A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes fro ...

stars and

type Ia supernova A Type Ia supernova (read: "type one-A") is a type of supernova that occurs in binary systems (two stars orbiting one another) in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. The other star can be anything from a giant star to an even smaller white ...

Life and career

García-Berro earned his master's degree in physics from the

University of Barcelona The University of Barcelona ( ca, Universitat de Barcelona, UB; ; es, link=no, Universidad de Barcelona) is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, in Spain. With 63,000 students, it is one of the biggest universities i ...

in 1982 with highest honors. He went on at Barcelona to pursue his Ph.D. with Jordi Isern. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics in 1987 ''cum laude.'' In 1987, García-Berro was appointed Associate Professor in Applied Physics at the

Polytechnic University of Catalonia The Technical University of Catalonia ( ca, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, , es, link=no, Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña; UPC), currently referred to as BarcelonaTech, is the largest engineering university in Catalonia, Spai ...

(UPC). In 2003, he was promoted to full Professor. From 2006 to 2013, he was the Vice-Rector at the UPC. García-Berro proved to be a capable administrator, and was appointed to be the director of the Serra Húnter program, designed to attract world-class faculty to Catalonian universities. García-Berro also served as the assistant director of the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) from 2002 to 2005. García-Berro was married to Isabel, a biologist at the University of Barcelona, and the couple had three children: Aurora, Isabel and Ignacio. García-Berro was an avid athlete and fan of outdoors sports, and was a keen mountain hiker and cyclist.

Research

García-Berro was a highly-productive scientific researcher and made a number of important contributions to the knowledge of stellar evolution, with a particular emphasis on white dwarfs. During a stay at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

, he collaborated with the renowned astrophysicist Icko Iben on the theory of stars whose initial masses are between 9 and 11 times the mass of the sun, right at the cusp between stars which ultimately form white dwarfs, and those which undergo

gravitational collapse Gravitational collapse is the contraction of an astronomical object due to the influence of its own gravity, which tends to draw matter inward toward the center of gravity. Gravitational collapse is a fundamental mechanism for structure formatio ...

. Together, they published a series of papers which remain standards in the field. Towards the end of his life, García-Berro carried out pioneering three-dimensional simulations of merging white dwarfs with his students and collaborators. These merging white dwarf systems are believed to give rise to a range of interesting stellar systems, from strongly-magnetized white dwarfs, to Type Ia supernovae and

R Coronae Borealis variable An R Coronae Borealis variable (abbreviated RCB, R CrB) is an eruptive variable star that varies in luminosity in two modes, one low amplitude pulsation (a few tenths of a magnitude), and one irregular, unpredictably-sudden fading by 1 to 9 ma ...

stars, to

gravitational wave Gravitational waves are waves of the intensity of gravity generated by the accelerated masses of an orbital binary system that propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1 ...

sources. He advised 14 PhD Theses and at least 12 degree or master theses most of them at the UPC. Several of these were related to the

Gaia In Greek mythology, Gaia (; from Ancient Greek , a poetical form of , 'land' or 'earth'),, , . also spelled Gaea , is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenog ...

space astrometry mission of

ESA , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (1205 ...

, including works on payload data handling and compression. Some led to publications on this more technological field, with the last one being published shortly after his death. These works triggered his participation as co-founder and associate of a spin-off company of the UPC and also of the UB, aiming at commercial applications of a patented data compression technology that he co-invented.

Death

García-Berro passed away during a tragic climbing accident on September 23, 2017 on the

Picos del Infierno Picos is a municipality in the state of Piauí in the Northeast region of Brazil. Picos is the state's third-largest city, located in the south-central region of Piauí and is the most economically developed city in the region. The city's finan ...

in the

Pyrenees The Pyrenees (; es, Pirineos ; french: Pyrénées ; ca, Pirineu ; eu, Pirinioak ; oc, Pirenèus ; an, Pirineus) is a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. It extends nearly from its union with the Cantabrian Mountains to C ...

, near

Sallent de Gállego Sallent de Gállego (in Aragonese: ''Sallent de Galligo'' or ''Sallén de Galligo'') is a municipality located in the province of Huesca, Aragon, Spain. The town is located in the central Pyrenees besides the reservoir of Lanuza on the foot of ...

, Spain.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Garcia-Berro, Enrique 1959 births 2017 deaths Spanish astrophysicists Polytechnic University of Catalonia