Patricia Arevalo

Main Researcher

patricia.arevalo (at) uv.cl

P. Arevalo is an associate professor for astronomy at Universidad de Valparaiso, and Investigadora Titular of the proposal. She obtained her PhD with magna cum laude distinction at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 2006, after which she held postdoc positions in the UK, Germany, China and Chile. She has established a new research group at Valparaiso, with two postdocs and one PhD student, which is dedicated to the study of accretion in nearby AGN and X-ray binaries using spectral and timing tools. She is an expert on accretion physics in general, and in particular on modeling techniques for the X-ray spectrum, which are essential both for NuSTAR and XMM-Newton. She recently obtained 200 ks of NuSTAR and 30 ks XMM-Newton observations as PI, which will be particularly valuable to study accretion physics at low accretion rates

Main Expertise

Patricia Arévalo is an expert on X-ray astronomy, employing data from NuSTAR, CHANDRA and the XMM-Newton satellite to probe the accretion processes in nearby AGN via timing variations and models of the X-ray spectrum. Combining and simultaneously fitting the X-ray data from different satellites, corresponding to hard and soft X-ray data, provides particularly powerful constraints on the corona.