I have some big news to share. From March 1, I’ll be starting a new chapter and moving to the dark side of astrophysics: the substellar world of ultracool dwarfs!
This seems like a natural moment to make the move. With the Euclid ESA mission now opening an enormous new window on the faint and cool populations of the Milky Way, we are entering an era in which the number of known ultracool and substellar objects will increase substantially. Turning this wealth of new observations into physical understanding will require careful work on the modelling side.
In some ways, though, I am not moving very far at all. My main interests will remain what they have been for years: developing numerical agoriths for radiative transfer, equations of state, opacities, and numerical modelling of atmospheres. The difference is that I will now be applying them much further down the temperature scale. At the temperatures of ultracool dwarfs, molecules dominate the opacity, chemistry becomes increasingly tricky, condensates and clouds appear, and the coupling between chemistry, radiation and atmospheric structure gets the central stage in modelling problem.
I’ll be joining the SUBSTELLAR project led by Eduardo Martín, one of the co-discoverers of Teide 1, the first confirmed brown dwarf, announced in 1995. The work is supported by the European Research Council through the ERC Advanced Grant SUBSTELLAR, devoted to pushing the frontier of substellar science with the Euclid mission.
A new wavelength regime, a new class of objects, and plenty of new physics — but, fortunately, still lots of opacities, radiative transfer and numerical challenges. I hope that this move will also allow me to bring some of my experience in stellar astrophysics across the boundary between these fields. I’m looking forward to seeing where it leads.
May the (gravity and Lorentz) Force be with me!
