Henri Boffin
Stay at the IAC: 07/05/18 to 07/06/18
Research line: Stellar Physics and Exoplanets
Dr. Henri Boffin is an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany.
He obtained his PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in 1993. After a post-doc in Kobe, Japan, and in Cardiff, UK, he was appointed astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in 1998. As he is very keen to share science with society, he has experience in journalism (with a diploma from the Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Lille), and in 2003, joined ESO as Astronomer and Press Officer, dealing with communication about all telescopes and projects of ESO. From August 2010 till April 2016, he moved to Chile where he was an ESO Paranal Operations Staff Astronomer and the FORS2 and HARPS instrument scientist. In 2016, he moved back to Germany, in the User Support Department, where he supports SPHERE, FORS2, MUSE, and KMOS and is the project scientist of the upgrades of FORS and of the ESO Exposure Time Calculator.
His research is devoted to the world of close binary stars, their formation and evolution. To this aim, he combines both observational and theoretical work, including hydrodynamical simulations. His current scientific interests also include symbiotic stars, Algols and binary nuclei of planetary nebulae, but more generally all interacting binary stars. He is also working on exoplanets, and more particularly on transmission spectroscopy.
Scientific activity during the period visiting the IAC:
During his stay at the IAC, he will work on planetary nebulae (PNe) and the importance of binary in explaining their shape and formation. In Tenerife, he will work with Jorge Garcia-Rojas on MUSE data of several planetary nebulae that are known to present very strong abundance discrepancy factors (ADF). These MUSE data should provide unique clues as to the reason of these anomalies. In La Palma, he will work with Dave Jones and Romano Corradi on the analysis of photometric and spectroscopic data of binary systems in PNe.
