Anne-Marie Lagrange: Exoplanet discovery and evolution

Anne-Marie Lagrange is a Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Laboratory for Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics (LESIA) at the Paris Observatory, and associate Professor at Paris Sciences et Lettres University.

She is a member of the French Academy of Science, and earned the Irène Joliot-Curie prize for the Female Scientist of the year in 2011. She specialized in the field of extra solar planetary systems (disks, comets, planets), with the aim to understand how such systems form and evolve, and to search for planets of various kinds, down to Earth twins.
She uses various kinds of approaches and observing techniques, in particular spectroscopy, absolute astrometry and high contrast imaging, and the combination of these techniques, to search for extrasolar planets, and characterize their atmospheres, and to study their link with the dust disks in which they orbit.
She was the scientific PI of the first adaptive optics instrument on the VLT, which allowed her team and her to make the first images of extrasolar planetary mass companions, opening thus a new path in the field.

She also studied how to estimate and compensate for stellar activity, which is the ultimate barrier against detecting Earth twins using radial velocities, and is a necessary step before imaging such planets, and characterizing their atmospheres.

Wiki-page of Anne-Marie Lagrange

Abstract: Exoplanetary systems represent a vibrant domain in today astronomy. Intriguing questions are how they form, how diverse they are, how unique our Solar System is, and whether life could be found in these distant worlds. I will describe how we find these extrasolar worlds, what they tell us about their diversity and their formation pathways. I will also describe the projects aiming at detecting Earth twins and possible signatures of life.