Dominic Couture

Dominic is currently a Ph.D. candidate at iREx under the supervision of René Doyon. During his research, he will use data from the TESS Observatory to look for exoplanets orbiting stars that are members of young moving groups. Young moving groups are associations of stars, mainly M dwarfs, formed at the same epoch by the collapse of a molecular cloud unique to every association and located in the solar neighbourhood, that share a common kinematics. They are ideal laboratories for the study of the last steps of stellar formation and direct imaging of exoplanets.

In 2019, he completed his M.Sc. at Université de Montréal also under the supervision of René Doyon. During his studies, he created a new numerical method, called Traceback, capable of finding a kinematic age of a YMG by traceback with data from the Gaia DR2 Catalog. When this method is applied to a sample of 46 validated members of the β Pictoris YMG, a corrected kinematic age of 17 − 19 Myr, in agreement with isochrones and litihum depletion boundary ages.

Dominic completed his undergraduate studies at Université Laval in physics in the spring of 2017 with an option in astrophysics. He completed an internship in medical physics in the summer of 2016 during which he worked on a dosimetric index calculation algorithm in radiotherapy and then worked on framework for patient dose tracking in radiology.

Supervisor

René Doyon