Top-10 of this year’s scientific discoveries by Québec Science.

Gilles Fontaine, professor at the Université de Montréal and member of the CRAQ, in the top-10 of this year’s scientific discoveries by Québec Science.

Gilles Fontaine, professor at the Université de Montréal and member of the CRAQ, in the top-10 of this year’s scientific discoveries by Québec Science.

 

Gilles Fontaine, his research team at the Université de Montréal and researchers at the Université de Toulouse (France) detected two Earth-sized planets around an old star, namely, a post red-giant star. Published in Nature, the discovery is particularly exciting for several reasons. “These planets are the smallest, the hottest, the closest to the host star, and the fastest that have been observed until now”, said Gilles Fontaine. Many of the researchers involved in this discovery are former students of Prof. Fontaine, including Stéphane Charpinet, from the Université de Toulouse, who was leading the work. The two discovered planets are probably the remains of gaseous giant planets, like Jupiter, orbiting close to the host star when it was still burning hydrogen, in other words, before the star became a red giant. Gilles Fontaine and his team are in the 2012 annual top-10 of the journal Quebec Science.

The public is now invited to vote for the discovery of the year from the list of selected discoveries on the website of Quebec Science.

The CRAQ congratulates Gilles Fontaine and his team for being part of this top-10.

Link to the news page: http://craq-astro.ca/actualite2_en.php?num_act=44