Research

Comets are the most primitive remnants from the formation of the Solar System. This allows them to be used as "fossils" in order to understand how our Solar System formed. As comets are rich in ices such as water and carbon dioxide and carbon-bearing molecules such as hydrogen cyanide and ethane, their composition gives us insights into how molecules formed in the early Solar System and how they were incorporated into planetary objects.

My reseach focuses on studying the volatile composition of comets at optical and infrared wavelengths through spectroscopy. Specifically, I am interested in linking optical and infrared observations to better understand the photochemistry occuring in cometary comae. Optical observations are the most sensitive and most abundant in the literature, but optical observations provide abundances of daughter species, species that are produced in the coma via photochemistry or other physical and chemical processes. This makes it difficult to interpret optical observations in terms of the composition of the cometary nucleus. On the other hand, infrared observations provide abundances of parent species, species that are released directly from the nucleus, but infrared observations are less sensitive and less abundant in the literature. Understanding the photochemistry occuring in cometary comae will allow for optical observations of daughter species to be better interpreted in terms of the composition of the nucleus.

For more details on specific projects, please see the publications list.