Stellar-MADE project
Romain Grane
Summary of my career
Unsure whether to become an engineer or a researcher, I began my higher education in Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Ecoles in which I studied intensively Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in order to enter France’s top engineering schools. Two years later, I decided to join the University of Bordeaux with the goal of specializing in astrophysics. There, I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and a Master’s degree in Fundamental Physics, with a specialization in Astrophysics.
During my studies at the University of Bordeaux, I completed several research internships focused on astrophysics. My first internship, conducted during my Bachelor’s degree, was supervised by Didier Despois at Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux (LAB). I studied the light curve of the interstellar object 1I/’Oumuamua by modeling the light curve of a rotating ellipsoid to highlight the difficulties of using only this information to characterize the shape and rotation of a body.
During this internship, I met Sean Raymond, with whom I completed another internship at LAB in the first year of my Master’s degree. This project focused on the dynamics of moons in unstable planetary systems. The goal was to analyze the possibility of keeping moons in orbit around ejected free-floating planets using N-body simulations with the Python library REBOUND. This internship greatly reinforced my interest in the evolution of planetary systems.
In the second year of my Master’s degree, I completed an internship supervised by Nicolás Cuello and Mario Sucerquia at Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG), focusing on the architectures of planetary systems around binary stars. Using N-body simulations with REBOUND, I studied the dynamics and stability of circumbinary planets after their migration phase to determine the optimal zones for observing these planets in binary systems.
I am currently pursuing a PhD as part of the Stellar-MADE project at IPAG, in which I continue to study the architectures of planetary systems in binary star systems, as well as in systems with three and four stars.
Ongoing research
It is known that a newly formed planet interacts with the surrounding protoplanetary disk, which primarily causes the planet to migrate inward within the disk. This migration depends essentially on the characteristics of the planet and the disk. At the end of this migration, several scenarios can occur: the planet might be ejected due to close encounters with other planets or stars in the system, or the planet’s orbit might stabilize through various mechanisms such as orbital resonances.
The objective of my second-year Master’s internship, which I am currently continuing as part of my PhD, was to model this phase of planetary migration for one or more rocky circumbinary planets, that is, planets orbiting around two stars. The aim was to find expected configurations of planetary systems to improve the research for circumbinary exoplanets in multiple star systems.
Subsequently, during my PhD, I plan to study the dynamics of circumstellar planets, which orbit a single star, and to deepen this study by including giant planets, whose migration differs from that of rocky planets. Ultimately, this will allow the creation of a catalog of planetary systems in 2, 3, and 4-star systems, which can be used for the exploitation of data from instruments such as the Gaia telescope.
Recent highlight
To be added soon!