Yolanda Gómez

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Yolanda Gómez Castellanos (1962–2012) was a Mexican astronomer who studied clouds in space, including planetary nebulae and small glowing regions called H II areas. She is known for finding water vapor in space using signals from masers around certain stars and planetary nebulae, which showed that some nebulae had formed very recently.

She was born in Mexico City in 1962. She studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), earning a bachelor’s degree in 1985 and a PhD in 1990. After a postdoctoral period at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, she became a researcher at UNAM in 1993, first at the Institute of Astronomy and later, from 2001, as a founding member of the Center for Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics at UNAM’s Morelia campus. She died on 16 February 2012. She was a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

In recognition of her work, UNAM gave her the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Recognition in 2005, and the government of Michoacán awarded her the State Prize for the Dissemination of Science and Technology in 2008.