Hello! My name is Vinicius [v-knee-see-uh-s] Placco and I am an Associate Astronomer at the NSF National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NSF NOIRLab). I work in the US National Gemini Office (US NGO | @usngo), which is a group within the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) at the NOIRLab. Here you will find details about my research, publications, CV, side projects, and much more! My contact information is provided below.

Research

My current research focuses on establishing observational constraints on the origins of the chemical elements in the Galaxy and the Universe through spectroscopic analysis of low-metallicity stars. Below you can find an interactive plot with a few selected synthetic spectra for stars with different metallicities ([Fe/H] - upper panel) and different carbon abundances ([C/Fe] - lower panel). All the spectra have the same effective temperature (Teff = 5250K) and surface gravity (logg=2.5). More details soon!
Access the simple jupyter notebook with the code to generate this plot:

Publications and CV

 Curriculum Vitae (pdf) | Google scholar
ADS (full list of publications) | ADS (refereed publications only)

Resources

carbon evolutionary corrections

age-map of the milky way halo

Side projects

geographical and gender distribution of IAU members

experiments with random walk

Monte Carlo method - Estimating π

Monte Carlo method - Gaussian integration

Teaching

Descriptive Astronomy - Summer 2019

Physics A Lab (Mechanics) - Fall 2019

Descriptive Astronomy - Spring 2020

Physics B Lab (Electricity and Magnetism) - Spring 2020

Contact

Email vinicius.placco@noirlab.edu | Email vmplacco@gmail.com
Google vmplacco | Twitter usngo | Skype vmplacco

If you got this far, please enjoy a time-lapse video created using screenshots from a webcam at
the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, while remote observing during Christmas 2020!