From the Galician coast to the skies of Tenerife

My name is Daniel Galán, and I am an astrophysicist from Galicia, in northwest Spain. I grew up in Meirás, a small village just outside Sada, in A Coruña. It is a quiet place, with very little light pollution, and the night sky was always part of the landscape.

From a very young age, I was fascinated by the stars. Growing up surrounded by dark skies meant that looking up at night was simply part of everyday life. I remember being curious about what those points of light actually were. One Christmas, I got my first telescope. It was a small instrument, but for me it opened a completely new way of looking at the sky. I could spend hours outside trying to find something new, slowly learning the constellations and becoming increasingly curious about the Universe behind them.

My interest in science also grew at elementary and high school. I studied at CEIP and IES O Mosteirón, where two teachers in particular had a lasting influence on me: Mariajo, my maths teacher, and Ángeles, my physics teacher. They were among the first people who made me see mathematics and physics not simply as school subjects, but as ways of understanding the world.

By the time I was in high school, I already knew that I wanted to study astrophysics. But there was one moment that made that decision feel completely real. In 2014, I watched Interstellar for the first time. I was already fascinated by space, but seeing black holes, wormholes, relativity, and the scale of the Universe portrayed in a film made me realize that the things I was curious about were not just science fiction: there was real physics behind them, and people actually studied it.

I later moved to IES María Casares in Oleiros for my Bachillerato (the last two years of high school). By then, my goal was already quite clear: study physics first, and then specialize in astrophysics. From there, I moved to Santiago de Compostela to study Physics at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.

My time in Santiago was where my idea of what it meant to be a physicist began to change. University was challenging, but it was also the first time I could explore physics in much greater depth and start thinking about it beyond textbooks and exams. I gradually discovered that what interested me most was using physics to understand real objects in the Universe.

In 2021, I moved to Tenerife to study for an MSc in Astrophysics at the Universidad de La Laguna, in a program taught alongside researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. It was my first real immersion in the astrophysics community and, for the first time, I found myself surrounded by people doing exactly the kind of research I had imagined myself doing years earlier.

Tenerife also brought me much closer to professional astronomy. After growing up watching the stars from Meirás, being surrounded by observatories, telescopes, and researchers felt like a natural continuation of the path I had started as a child.

It was also in Tenerife that I met María Jesús Arévalo, who would become my master's thesis supervisor and, much more importantly, a person who had a lasting influence on me. Working with her taught me far more than how to do research. She taught me the value of patience, of taking the time to understand a problem rather than rushing toward an answer, and of trusting my own judgment even when I was not completely sure of myself. She encouraged me to ask questions, to make mistakes without being afraid of them, and to believe that I was capable of doing research of my own. Many of those lessons have stayed with me long after my master's, and continue to influence the way I approach science and the people I work with.

Since November 2023, I have been working on my PhD at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, funded by an FPI fellowship. My research now focuses on massive stars and, in particular, on stars that rotate so rapidly that their shape and appearance are significantly affected by their rotation.

I also enjoy sharing astronomy outside academia. I have taken part in radio and television shows, podcasts, and other outreach activities, trying to explain astronomy in a way that keeps some of the same sense of curiosity that first attracted me to it as a child.

Looking back, the path seems fairly simple. I grew up under dark skies in Meirás, became fascinated by the stars, discovered Interstellar during high school, and gradually found my way from a small telescope to university, observatories, and research.