My time at iREx: Thomas Navarro

Thomas Navarro joined IREx in 2019 as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. In autumn 2024, he joined Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Canadian Meteorological Centre as a researcher. Here, he answers some of our questions about his work as a postdoctoral fellow at IREx.

IREx: What did you like most about your time in Montreal?
Thomas: I particularly like the city’s cultural diversity and strong identity, which make Montreal a place you never stop discovering! Moreover, Quebec has a very generous family policy, making life much easier as a parent and researcher.

IREx: What are some of the outstanding projects you’ve carried out at IREx?
Thomas: I worked on numerical modelling of the atmospheres of telluric (also called rocky) exoplanets and the inclusion of new physical phenomena in numerical models, in particular the effect of tidal forces and the long-term interactions between polar caps and atmospheres.

IREx: What questions were you trying to answer?
Thomas: In the Universe, the vast majority of telluric planets in the habitable zone are those in synchronous rotation (they always show the same face) around the least massive stars, called red dwarfs. My research aimed to understand what conditions might prevail on these planets. Unfortunately, observational methods do not allow us to examine these distant worlds in sufficient detail, and there are no such examples in our Solar System. To study these stars, I therefore use numerical simulations to conduct virtual experiments, adapting to exoplanets advanced climate models that have proved their worth in modelling the Earth and other bodies in the Solar System.

IREx: What did you discover?

Thomas: The tidal forces on planets orbiting red dwarfs can be considerable — hundreds of times greater than those on Earth. However, we found that their impact on atmospheric flow was minimal and that their impact on climate was negligible, except in really extreme cases where the solid surface of the planet is on the verge of melting because these tidal forces are too great.

I have also combined models to study how the atmosphere interacts with the polar ice caps, the expanses of ice at the poles of a planet. I realised that, because of the complexity of the physical phenomena that occur in the atmosphere and the ice, it is difficult to predict how much water can be captured in the form of ice in the part of the planet that is constantly in darkness, and therefore not available for long periods of time on the light side of the planet. This has important implications for the habitability of the planet.

IREx: What motivates you in exoplanet research?

Thomas: Having done specific research on Mars and Venus before coming to IREx, I found it fascinating to be able to study concepts that concern an unimaginable number of planets in our Universe.

IREx: Why should people be interested in this kind of work?

Thomas: Research into exoplanets is taking us into a revolutionary era in our understanding of the Universe, and incidentally of our place in it. Scientific research can be highly technical, sometimes abstract and difficult to access in its details, but it carries a universal message.

IREx: How will your time with us help you in the future?

Thomas: My experience in atmospheric physics and modelling phenomena is very relevant to my new job as a researcher at the Canadian Meteorological Centre of Environment and Climate Change Canada, where I’m helping to improve weather prediction techniques. At IREx I was able to work in a multidisciplinary context, which is an asset when it comes to interacting with meteorologists, computer scientists, physicists and so on. My profile is not unique, as there are other people at the Canadian Meteorological Centre who trained at IREx (Anne Boucher, Antoine Darveau-Bernier), and more generally a significant number of scientists who have been involved in astrophysics at some point in their studies or career.

To find out more about Thomas, visit his website.