Dr. Jonathan Gagné

Biography

Jonathan Gagné is an Associate Professor at the University of Montreal and a scientific advisor at the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium, Space for Life. He previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Exoplanet Research Institute of the University of Montreal. His research focuses on the kinematics of stars in the Solar neighborhood, young star associations, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets. Recently, he worked with data from the Gaia mission, which provides direct distance measurements for one billion stars with unprecedented accuracy. This data has revolutionized astrophysics, enabling his team to identify new groups of stars with the same age and chemical composition, and to discover numerous faint low-mass members in already known star groups. He is also involved in identifying isolated cold planetary-mass objects in space that do not orbit a star. Such faint objects can be challenging to detect but offer interesting analogs for understanding the atmospheres of giant exoplanets, given their similar physical properties (temperature, clouds, surface gravity, and atmospheric pressure). The absence of a bright host star facilitates the study of these isolated objects once their position is pinpointed.

Research Interests

Experience