Hector Canovas

 

Main Research Fields

Protoplanetary discs are large structures of dust and gas that naturally form around young stars. They are the birth-sites of planets and therefore their study is key to understand how our Solar System was born. I have studied protoplanetary discs using a variety of tools including imaging polarimetry at near-infrared wavelengths with the VLTs, sub-millimeter interferometric with ALMA, and radiative transfer models with MCFOST. In the past I have also focussed in discs showing (in?)direct evidences of planet-disc interaction, such as dust-depleted inner cavities and/or spiral structures. More recently, I have used the astrometric measurements provided by Gaia to identify members of young stellar regions using machine learning (non-supervised) clustering algorithms.

Keywords

• T Tauri & Herbig Ae/Be stars.
• Protoplanetary discs.
• Planet-disc interactions.
• Imaging Polarimetry
• Interferometry
• Clustering algorithms: DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, OPTICS

Ongoing collaborations

• Miguel Vioque, ESO (Germany/ESO Garching)
• Claudio Cáceres (Chile/ Universidad Andrés Bello)
• Gaia DPAC

Past collaborations

• Carlos Eiroa, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
• Benjamín Montesinos, Centro de Astrobiologia, Spain.
• Lucas Cieza, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.
• Matthias Schreiber, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile.
• Francois Menard, IPAG, Grenoble, France.

Publications

ADS link

Project/mission at ESA

I joined ESAC since October 2017 as a Research Fellow, as part of the Gaia science group. Since January 1st 2020 I work as support Archive Scientist of the Gaia ESA Archive. Since January 1st 2025 my work is divided bwtween the Euclid and the Gaia ESA Archives (50% each).

Research Group at ESAC