Silvia Bravo

Silvia Susana Bravo Núñez (Celaya, Guanajuato 1945– Mexico City 2000) was a Mexican physicist specializing in solar physics including the study of the Sun corona, solar wind, and the Sun's magnetic field. She was one of the pioneering researchers in the department of space sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Institute of Geophysics.

Education and career Bravo obtained, in 1968, a degree in theoretical and experimental physics at the UNAM with the thesis La modulación de la radiación cósmica galáctica en el medio interplanetario (Modulation of galactic cosmic radiation in the interplanetary medium). In 1989 she completed a PhD at her alma mater, with a dissertation entitled Los agujeros coronales del sol como fuentes de perturbaciones a gran escala en el viento solar (The Sun's coronal holes as sources of large-scale disturbances in the solar wind), advised by Blanca Emma Mendoza Ortega. Her doctoral work was supported by research conducted at the Cavendish Laboratory in England

In the early 1990s, Bravo came up with the idea of studying the solar wind and space weather by means of a radio telescope built in Mexico. In 1997, a prototype interplanetary scintillation radio telescope was completed in Teoloyucan, State of Mexico. The objectives of this prototype were to train a team of technicians with the necessary knowledge, to verify the designs and materials to be used in the final model, and to integrate a first group of students into the project. The prototype revealed the magnitude of the problem caused by electromagnetic noise, which led Dr. Bravo and her team to look for a more suitable site for the construction of the final radio telescope. In 2000, a site was secured in the municipality of Coeneo in the state of Michoacán with the necessary characteristics, i.e., a flat area surrounded by low hills, far from major sources of electromagnetic noise and with access for the construction and operation of the radio telescope.

Upon Bravo's death, members of her team continued the project, with support from the governments of the municipality of Coeneo and the state of Michoacán, and celebrated the laying of the first stone of the antenna on February 10, 2001. In 2005, the construction of the radio telescope, called the Interplanetary Scintillation Observatory and known in English as the Mexican Array Radio Telescope or MEXART, was completed. This radio telescope is the only one of its kind in the Americas and operates as part of a global network that monitors space weather and warns of disturbances that may affect technology on Earth.

In 2014, she became one of the 31 women in the formal and natural sciences honored with a monument in the Paseo de la Mujer Mexicana in the Fundidora Park in Monterrey, Nuevo León

In 2012, the IV Silvia Bravo Colloquium was held as part of the Annual Meeting of the Mexican Geophysical Union with the objective of presenting technical papers related to solar physics, space weather and cosmic rays.

In 2020 the Institute of Geophysics inaugurated the Dr. Silvia Susana Bravo Núñez Scholarship Program to support students of physics.