Montreal, May 9th, 2005 – Christian Marois has recently won the 2005 Plaskett medal awarded each year to the Ph.D. graduate from a Canadian university who is judged to have submitted the most outstanding thesis in astronomy or astrophysics in the preceding two calendar years. The award, consisting of a gold medal, is bestowed jointly by the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) in recognition of the pivotal role played by John Stanley Plaskett in the establishment of astrophysical research in Canada. The laureate is also invited to address one or the other of the sponsoring Societies (at his or her choice) at their Annual Meetings and to prepare a review paper to be published in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. This year, Dr. Marois will address the Canadian Astronomical Society at its Annual Meeting hosted by the Université de Montréal (Montréal, QC) from May 14 to 17.

During his undergraduate years at the Université de Montréal, Christian Marois was involved in research on globular clusters with Professor René Racine and Dr. Howard Bond (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD). After graduating, Christian Marois completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. studies at the Université de Montréal in exoplanet research under the supervision of Dr. René Doyon and professors Daniel Nadeau and René Racine. His doctoral thesis entitled “La recherche de naines brunes et d’exoplanètes: développement d’une technique d’imagerie multibande”, is based on data obtained with a camera built by Dr. Marois and designed expressly to take simultaneously three images of the same field at adjacent wavelengths in the infrared. The contrast between the spectrum of a star and that of a cool substellar object, due to methane absorption in the atmosphere of the latter, provides a way to search for faint companions around nearby stars through accurate subtraction of the starlight in the observed images. The main result of the thesis is a much improved understanding of the differential aberrations between the images that paves the way for next generation instruments with expected orders of magnitude increases in sensitivity. The thesis includes the conceptual design for such an instrument, where spectral separation of the starlight is done on a pixel scale in the focal plane of the image.

Over the course of his studies, Christian Marois has received several awards and fellowships from the Université de Montréal, the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). He is currently pursuing his research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, CA), building an advanced high contrast imaging instrument and using the Gemini 8 meter and Keck 10 meter telescopes to search for brown dwarfs and exoplanets.

For more information:

Professor Daniel Nadeau
Phone: (514) 343-6676
Email: nadeau@astro.umontreal.ca

Dr René Doyon
Phone : (514) 343-6111 x3204
Email : doyon@astro.umontreal.ca

Dr Christian Marois
Phone: (925) 424-2581
Email: cmarois@igpp.ucllnl.org

PIO Contact:

Robert Lamontagne
Attaché de presse/Press Officer
Société canadienne d’astronomie/Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA)
(514) 343-6111 (p.3195)
Cell: (514) 715-2147
Courriel: lamont@astro.umontreal.ca

The complete program of CASCA 2005 is available at: http://mars.astro.umontreal.ca/english/