He is Full Professor and Director of the Astronomy Institute at Andrés Bello National University (UNAB), Chile.
[1] His non refereed publications include 18 papers in 'The Messenger' [2](ESO) since 1995, such as 'Behind the Scenes of the Discovery of Two Extrasolar Planets: ESO Large Programme 666' [3] dedicated to the hunt of sub-stellar objects (exoplanets and brown dwarfs), stretching the limits of what was possible with the VLT by 2006, started the planet hunting for many promising candidates from OGLE.
19 and his summer holidays were spent at the grandparent's house in San Javier,[citation needed] a nearby village where his great grandfather Angelo Minniti, settled at the beginnings of the XX th century, coming originally from Guardavalle,[citation needed] Provinzia di Catanzaro, Italy.
His undergraduate studies were done at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina,[citation needed] where he obtained his Licenciatura degree and started a long-life collaboration with Professor Juan José Clariá.
The school was about 'The Structure and Dynamics of Galaxies', with lectures from Vera Rubin, Martin McCarthy and Dave Latham.
George Coyne and the support of the Vatican Observatory, he obtained the first 'Father Martin McCarthy' scholarship to carry out his graduate studies at the Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona, where he obtained his PhD in 1993 with his thesis work on 'Kinematics and stellar populations of the galactic bulge' [14] with Profs.
Minniti obtained another PhD at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina in 1998, working on "Metal Poor Globular Clusters in the Milky Way" with Prof. Juan José Clariá as supervisor.
[19] That same year, he was also named Director of Research and Doctoral Programs at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2008–2011).
As a follow-up of the MACHO project, SuperMACHO aim was to search for microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud using the CTIO 4m Blanco telescope and the MOSAIC imager (LMC) to identify the type of population that causes the excessive microlensing rate that the MACHO study observed.
Some variability aspects resemble the Boyjianian's star or a Mamajek's object, which are very rare, with proposed explanations ranging from eclipses by a cometary system or misaligned disks, to the presence of a Dyson sphere.
The "giant that blinked" (coined by Leigh Smith) may be a distant red supergiant eclipsed by an inclined dust disk.
They were able to detect them well beyond the galactic center (because the interstellar medium is more transparent to the infrared light), and they could trace the structure of the far side of the Milky Way.
On exoplanets and astrobiology he has contributed with the inspection and refinement of exoplanet detection methods such as radial velocities, the detection of GJ 832c, a super-Earth orbiting the edges of the habitable zone of GJ 832, the understanding of temperate planetary atmospheres and an interesting work with Valentin Ivanov and collaborators entitled 'A qualitative classification of extraterrestrial civilizations' [30] intended to the improve the design of strategies for the search of extraterrestrial civilizations.
of the VVV Survey and eXtended version VVVX along with fostering new scientists as PhDs, Dante had the opportunity to develop his research on every aspect of the scientific goals of the VVV and VVVX, publishing more than 160 papers on discoveries and development about subjects such as Variable Stars, Extinction Law, Open Clusters, Globular Clusters, Photometric and astrometric catalogues, Milky Way structure (spiral structure, arms, disk, bulge, bar), big data, automated tools for detecting certain sets of objects, analysis of physical processes on different objects such as YSOs, WITs, assessing stellar populations, analysis of survival on the extreme environment like the galactic center, near-IR catalogues of over 2 x 10^9 sources from which 10^7 are variable.
Both science goals were very similar, so ESO encouraged Dante and Phil to team up with a unified proposal for the Bulge and Southern Disk of the Milky Way, which resulted on the VVV Survey and was awarded a total of 1929 hours of observation in 192 nights over the lapse of 5 years and upon 520 sq.
[37] One of the science objectives was using RR Lyrae stars, well-known distance markers, to construct a three-dimensional map of the Bulge.
A deep near-IR atlas with five passbands (0.9-2.5 microns on the Z, Y, J, H, Ks bands) and a list of more than 10^6 variable point sources was the planned result.
Enabling additional research into the Milky Way's history, the evolution of its globular clusters, a population count of the Galactic Bulge and core, and an examination of the star-forming regions in the disk.
They also provide a unique dataset to map the stellar populations in the Galactic bulge and the adjacent southern plane.
The VVV catalogues are also available through the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Astronomy's Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU),[41] the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit (CASU) [42] and at the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) through VIZIER [43] and through ALADIN desktop application.