Jean-Philippe Beaulieu
Directeur de recherche CNRS Planning for the coming months: |
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Latest publication, at the invitation of Julien Flak, Poésie Féroce, arts anciens de Nouvelle Irelande. A book published, "Secret Garden at Recherche Bay - 1792". Launched in Hobart on February 24 2016.
Oceanic art, New Ireland, Uli, Malagan Fun : Hotel Mauna Kea (the truth about observing) La Silla under the snow (2004) The PLANET collaboration was involved in the monitoring of the Comet 9P Tempel-1 before the Deep Impact planned on July 4, 2005. Check the gallery of pictures of the comet and the comet update from July 5, 11h00 The french garden of Recherche Bay (a kitchen garden from d'Entrecasteaux expedition unearthed in 2003 in Tasmania) Daniel estrade, etchings, watercolor A 5.5 Earth mass planet detected by microlensing, Beaulieu et al. 2006, Nature. Download the article here. Artistic view of the planet HOLMES : 2007-2011 Hunting cOol Low Mass Extrasolar planetS 2007-2011 Our primary objective is the discovery of low mass planets (1 – 15 Earth masses) within 1 – 5 AU of the most common stars in our Galaxy by microlensing effects in order to measure their frequency. As a secondary objective we will do detailed studies of known planetary systems (including probing their atmospheres during planetary transits) and estimate their physical properties. . |
My research activities have been fully dedicated to the field of exoplanet searches and characterization over the last 23 years. I am activily working on three topics simultaneously : - Demographics of planets close to their birth place & their occurrence in the disk and the bar of our Galaxy. COLD-WORLDS - Characterisation of extrasolar planets atmosphere with ARIEL space mission - An exoplanet census via microlensing with EUCLID, WFIRST ARIEL (a 1m space telescope concept to do spectroscopy of extrasolar planets in the range 0.5-9 microns) due to launch in 2028. EUCLID is an accepted ESA mission (wide field imager in space) due to be launched on 2022.
COLD-WORLDS 2018-2022 COLD-WORLDS aims to use gravitational microlensing to explore a unique niche, cold planets down to Earth mass orbiting around any kind of star, at any distance towards the Galactic center, rogue planets and moons orbiting exoplanets (exomoons). These are in very different environments from most known exoplanets, allowing key tests of planet formation theory. Indeed, the maximum sensitivity is for planets at the snow line, close their formation location. To date, 55 microlensing planets have been published and these results challenge theories of planet formation. The core accretion population synthesis predictions by Ida’s and Bern’s groups are quite similar and both under-predict the number of observed cold planets at a mass ratio of q =2E-4) by a factor of ~25. It might be due to the run-away gas accretion phase of planet formation, which is a basic feature of the core accretion theory. Alternatively, it could be that there is some host star mass dependence of this run-away gas accretion gap that smooths out this feature when plotted as a function of mass ratio. So, it is important to accurately determine the individual masses for the planets and host stars. 1/ What is the mass distribution of cold planets down to ~1 Earth mass at the snow line, where most planets are formed?
Older press release : Press release KECK-II and Hubble Space Telescope (July 30 2016), KECK-II & Hubble Space telescope team up to confirm distant Uranus mass planet through microlensing. Selected publications : Beaulieu, J.-P. et al., 2006, Discovery of a cool planet of 5.5 Earth masses through gravitational microlensing, Nature 439, 437–440 Tinetti, G., Vidal-Madjar, A., Liang, M.-C., Beaulieu, J.P. et al. 2007, Water vapour in the atmosphere of a transiting extrasolar planet, Nature, 448(7150), 169–171. Gaudi, B.S. et al., 2008, Discovery of a Jupiter/Saturn Analog with Gravitational Microlensing, Science 319, 927–930. Cassan A. Kubas D., Beaulieu J.P., et al., 2012, One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations, Nature 481, 167-169.EUCLID is an accepted ESA mission (wide field imager in space) due to be launched on 2020. ECHO (a 1.3m space telescope concept to do spectroscopy of extrasolar planets in the range 0.5-16 microns). It will be re-submitted to ESA this fall.
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