Anne-Marie Lagrange

Anne-Marie Lagrange (X82) is a research director at the CNRS, an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire d’Instrumentation et de Recherche (LIRA, Paris Observatory) and an adjunct professor at Paris Sciences & Lettres University. She is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Her work, based on observation, instrumentation, and modeling, focuses on the research and study of extrasolar planetary systems.

In the 1990s, she studied the gas and dust disks that form the cradle of planet formation, particularly that of the star Beta Pictoris, which she would use as a “proxy” throughout her research. She co-discovered the first exocomets on this star, then predicted the existence of a planet that she would image a decade later using a coronography technique coupled with adaptive optics on the European Very Large Telescope in Chile. This exoplanet, discovered in 2008, orbits at the same distance as Saturn around the Sun.

In the early 2000s, she proposed an instrument entirely dedicated to the direct detection and characterization of giant exoplanets, which would enable the discovery of several new exoplanets. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, she captured an image of a very young Saturn-like planet, pushing the limits of exoplanet imaging detection by an order of magnitude. This was the first exoplanet discovered by James Webb. Anne-Marie Lagrange also studies the physical limitations that currently prevent the detection of true Earth twins, on which we would one day like to find signs of life.