At Tuesday night’s Brownsville City Commission meeting, a UTRGV physics professor spoke about the opening of the new astronomical observatory in a local state park, which will be named after his late student.
The new observatory, which was formerly located on the UTRGV Brownsville campus and named the Nompuewenu observatory, has been moved to Resaca de la Palma State Park and renamed the Dr. Cristina V. Torres Memorial Astronomical Observatory.
Resaca de la Palma State Park is located at 1000 New Carmen Ave. in Brownsville. The observatory is 30 feet in diameter.
Mario Diaz, the physics professor, presented information on the observatory, which was named after his late student, Cristina Torres.
“Cristina was a student taking my physics class in 1996, the first physics class I taught here,” Diaz said in an interview with The Rider last Wednesday. “I got her interested in physics, so she studied physics. She graduated, did her master’s and her Ph.D., then she [left the Valley] to go work for Caltech. It brought her back as a research assistant professor and only after a couple of years after she came back, she passed away all of a sudden of a heart attack at 37 years old.”
Torres died in 2015 and left the physics program $10,000 in her will. To honor her memory, Diaz created the Cristina Torres Memorial Fund.
He also gives her credit for the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics he was awarded in 2016.
“This prize is one of the most important prizes in physics, after the Nobel Peace Prize,” Diaz said. “I got it, but Cristina would’ve gotten it if she hadn’t passed away because she’s one of the authors of the paper, a part of history.”
The observatory was originally at UTRGV until it was moved about three years ago. It will benefit the Edinburg and Brownsville campuses, Diaz said.
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“They will be able to use the observatory remotely, through the internet,” he said. “All seven telescopes are going to be hooked to the internet and can be operated from anywhere they want.”
UTRGV has signed an agreement with Texas Parks and Wildlife. This partnership will eventually lead to the development of a High Tech Planetarium and an Earth & Space Science Museum.
In 2017, the UTRGV Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy received the Nobel Prize in physics.
“Last year, for the first time, we succeeded in observing gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation images from the same event,” Diaz said.
Additionally, the observatory will be utilized as a community resource.
“The observatory will be a center of attraction for tourism and visitors, and a badge of pride for the community,” he said.
It will serve as a scientific tool for general education science college students and for Brownsville Independent School District high school students.
BISD high schools will offer “hands-on, inquiry-based, student-centered learning” astronomy classes using the observatory next fall.
“The principle behind this is you don’t learn science by reading books, you learn science by doing science,” Diaz said. “We expect the students to come here to learn the excitement of discovery and learn science.”
The renaming ceremony will take place at 6 p.m. May 5 at the Resaca de la Palma State Park. Admission is free.
