Jonathan Gagné

I am a PhD student at Université de Montréal in the field of astrophysics. I currently work on the identification of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in young, nearby stellar moving groups. Those are groups of stars that formed together from the same molecular cloud, several million years ago. I participate in the development of a statistical Bayesian inference tool that can identify candidate members, starting from a cross-correlation of the 2MASS and WISE near-infrared stellar catalogues. This tool drastically reduces the number of stars we have to follow-up, as well as the false-positive rates in our sample. I focus my search on late-type, cool (> M5) members to the TW Hydrae, Beta Pictoris, Tucana-Horologium, Columba, Carina, Argus and AB Doradus moving groups and associations.

I use optical spectroscopy (GMOS at Gemini-North and Gemini-South, MAGE and the Magellan telescope), as well as near-infrared spectroscopy (SpeX at IRTF, FLAMINGOS-II at Gemini-South, FIRE at Magellan, OSIRIS at SOAR, SIMON at Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic and at CTIO) to follow-up more than 300 strong candidates. I have as well started a high-resolution NIR follow-up of a few best candidates, using CRIRES at the VLT, in order to measure radial velocity of those stars.