Professor René Doyon’s research activities are focussed on the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation for various ground- and space-based observatories. He is also actively involved in various observational programs for detecting and characterizing brown dwarfs, exoplanets and young low-mass stars. On the instrumentation front, he leads several infrared instrumentation projects (camera and spectrograph) for the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic. Professor Doyon is co-investigator of the Gemini Planet Imager, which has been operational since 2013.
Professor Doyon is also co-principal investigator of SPIRou, a high-resolution infrared spectrograph installed on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope since 2018. Scheduled for operation in 2015, SPIRou is designed to detect terrestrial (Earth-like) planets within the “habitable zone” of low-mass stars in the solar neighborhood. He is also principal investigator of NIRISS, one of the four scientific instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.
Professor Doyon is the Director of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets and the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic.
Title: Do Nearby Habitable-World Candidates Have an Atmosphere?
Abstract: Small, temperate, rocky planets around low-mass stars are now known to be abundant in the solar neighborhood. Current occurrence-rate estimates indicate that a significant fraction (15–50%) of M dwarfs host at least one planet in the habitable zone, raising the exciting possibility that a fraction of these worlds possess atmospheres and surface conditions suitable for liquid water. Among them, transiting systems are for now the easiest to study. Only a handful meet the stringent criteria of habitable-world candidates, that is planets in the habitable zone with precisely measured masses and radii, enabling detailed internal-structure models and constraints on their possible water inventories. The James Webb Space Telescope offers, for the first time, the capability to determine whether such planets retain an atmosphere through transmission spectroscopy and thermal-emission photometry, and to probe its composition if present. In this seminar, I will briefly highlight the current status of JWST observations of nearby rocky planets, along with essential complementary contributions from ground-based high-resolution spectroscopy, notably SPIRou and NIRPS. I will conclude with a perspective on the next major step: the characterization of nearby non-transiting habitable worlds with the European Extremely Large Telescope, poised to transform the exoplanet field in the next decade.