My time at IREx: Anne Boucher

Anne Boucher joined IREx in 2014 as a Master’s student. After completing her graduate studies, she was hired as a postdoctoral researcher for six months at McGill University, within IREx. For almost two years now, she has been working as a Physical Sciences Specialist at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, Environment and Climate Change Canada. Here, she answers some of our questions about her postdoctoral fellowship at IREx.

IREx: What did you enjoy most about your time in Montréal?
Anne: Actually, I was born and raised in Montréal! I guess the fact that I stayed here for all of my studies shows how attached I am to the city and how great it is to live here. I even now have a job as a scientist on the island!
It’s a city with a rich and diverse culture, lots of food options, warm people, and countless activities to enjoy, including the many festivals that take place all year round.

IREx: What were the most significant projects you worked on at IREx?
Anne: During my short time as a postdoctoral researcher, right after my PhD, the most significant project I worked on focused on the detection and characterization of the atmosphere on the nightside of the ultra-hot Jupiter KELT-20 b. To do this, I used the emission spectroscopy method, which involves observing the combined light of a star and its planet at the same time.

By isolating the variations in light caused by the planet’s atmosphere (its emission spectrum), we can, among other things, deduce the atmospheric composition as well as the global dynamics (the general movement of winds in the upper atmosphere). I used high-resolution data from the infrared spectropolarimeter SPIRou, installed on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawaii, and then applied the STARSHIPS analysis program (Spectral Transmission And Radiation Search for High resolutIon Planet Signal), a tool I developed with the help of my colleague Antoine Darveau-Bernier during my PhD.

IREx: What questions were you trying to answer?
Anne: We were trying to better understand the composition and dynamics of ultra-hot Jupiter atmospheres, giant gas planets that orbit extremely close to their star. They always present the same side to their star. This permanent dayside is sometimes even hotter than some brown dwarfs! So, we wanted to learn more about the mechanisms that redistribute energy from the dayside to the nightside and how that affects atmospheric composition.

IREx: What did you discover?
Anne: We obtained the first high-resolution observations of light emitted by the nightside of this type of object. We learned that the water (H2O) and carbon monoxide (CO) signals behaved differently on the dayside compared to the nightside, which confirmed what had been predicted by 3D atmospheric models. These kinds of observations are very useful to validate such models. And they can be done from the ground with telescopes, which is much easier and less expensive than space-based observations.

IREx: What motivates you about exoplanet research?
Anne: I’d say what motivated me most was knowing that I was contributing, even if just a little, to the advancement of knowledge and techniques that might one day allow us to detect life on another planet. But beyond that, the exoplanet field is incredibly vast (to say the least), with so much left to discover, so the stage was well set for exploration.

Also, something that made me particularly happy and proud recently was learning that my code (STARSHIPS) is still being used by students and researchers. They continue to improve it, and even organise workshops on how to use it!

IREx: Why do you think people should care about this kind of work?
Anne: Curiosity alone is already a very good reason, but I’d say that being able to detect and study balls of rock and gas wandering through space, light-years away from us, is absolutely fascinating. I still can’t believe we’re able to do that! It’s wild!

Beyond that, exoplanet research helps us better understand our own solar system and the origins of life on Earth, which are also exciting topics. Plus, to achieve this, we need to develop new technologies and observation methods, which often find applications in other scientific and technological fields, and even in our everyday lives.

IREx: How did your time with us helped you move forward?
Anne: At IREx, I had the chance to work in a multidisciplinary environment. In my current role as a Physical Sciences Specialist at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, Environment and Climate Change Canada, that experience is a real asset when it comes to collaborating with meteorologists, computer scientists, physicists, and others. There are also other IREx alumni at the Canadian Meteorological Centre (Thomas Navarro, Antoine Darveau-Bernier), and more broadly, quite a few scientists here have at some point studied or worked in astrophysics.

My postdoctoral project allowed me to gain strong expertise in collaborative code development (with Git version control, through the ongoing development and improvement of STARSHIPS). That’s a skill I use a lot now. My expertise in programming, data analysis, signal processing, and problem-solving are other skills I developed during this fellowship that are extremely useful in my day-to-day work. I’ve been able to automate and optimize many tasks thanks to these skills, which has impressed quite a few colleagues who didn’t have training in programming! It also allows me to focus on other, more technical tasks. And instead of having my head in the stars, now I have my head in the clouds, right here on Earth!

Find Anne on LinkedIn!