Jonathan Gagné, PhD

Jonathan is a scientific advisor at the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium, Space for Life, and is an associate professor at the University of Montreal.
Previously, he was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets at 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 has worked with data from the Gaia mission, which provided direct distance measurements for a billion stars with unprecedented precision. This data represents a true revolution in astrophysics. With this data, Jonathan’s team identified new groups of stars that share the same age and chemical composition, and they found many low-luminosity and low-mass members in already known star groups.
He is also working on identifying cold, isolated planetary-mass objects in space that are not in orbit around a star. These objects are faint and can be located anywhere in the sky, making them difficult to detect, but they are interesting analogs for understanding the atmospheres of giant exoplanets because their physical properties (temperature, clouds, surface gravity, and atmospheric pressure) are similar. The absence of a bright host star also makes it easier to study these isolated objects once their position is pinpointed.