Yuri Messias

Yuri started his PhD in 2020 at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in Brazil, supervised by José Renan de Medeiros. Since February 2023, he is in a sandwich-doctorate program at Université de Montréal, under the supervision of René Doyon. In this internship, he uses data from the NIRPS (Near Infrared Planet Searcher), which is a spectrograph installed in the 3.6m telescope in La Silla (Chile) and has been in operation since April 2023.

With this data, Yuri works on two scientific projects. The first is centered on the search for planets around stars that are surrounded by circumstellar disks, which are structures similar to the Kuiper belt made of dust, gas and other particles, and play an important role in planetary formation. The second one focuses on planets orbiting stars with flares. Flares are brief eruptions of high energy radiation that occur in a star for various reasons, mainly because of magnetic activity, and may have effects on the habitability of exoplanets.

As for his PhD thesis, Yuri is using data from spatial missions Kepler and TESS (Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite) to research the synchronization regimes between stellar rotation periods and planetary orbital periods, and how this configuration affects the conditions for habitability. He did his Master’s and Bachelor also in UFRN, focusing on statistical studies about the stellar rotation and orbital planetary period ratio and debris disks in white dwarfs, respectively.

Supervisor

René Doyon