Jonathan Gagne

Jonathan Gagné is a scientific advisor at the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium in Montreal, and associate professor at Université de Montréal. He completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics in 2015 and moved to the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. for a 3-year postdoc as a Sagan Fellow. He came back in Montreal to start a second postdoc at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets before he was hired by the Planetarium.

Jonathan's expertise is focused on brown dwarfs, young stars, exoplanets, and stellar associations. He uses various telescopes throughout the world to carry his research, from the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic in Québec, the Infrared Telescope Facilities in Hawaii and Gemini-South in Chile. Since the launch of the Gaia space telescope by the European Space Agency, he uses these new data to discover the still-missing smallest stars in young stellar associations. This allows the scientific community to better understand the fundamental properties of these small stars: it is a crucial step to then understand the properties of exoplanets we find in orbit around them.

Jonathan is a member of a few international collaborations such as Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, which concentrates on the discovery and study of brown dwarfs. His research projects led him to also discover some of the first brown dwarfs which masses are so low that they are similar to gas giant exoplanets, except that they float freely in space instead of being found in orbit around a star. These rare objects are sometimes called "planemos".

In his free time, Jonathan is a total coffee geek, and enjoys perfecting his barista skills while exploring methods to draw the full potential of coffee beans from different origins around the world

Forthcoming Events

Previous Events

• Thursday, 3rd December 2020 - Stellar Associations and Planemos, and How they Will Help Us Better Understand Exoplanets

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