Valérie de Lapparent
Permanent senior researcher
Institutd'Astrophysique
de Paris
Valérie de LapparentPermanent senior researcher |
Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris |
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98 bis Boulevard Arago
75014 Paris, France |
Valérie de Lapparent is an astrophysicist at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, a joint laboratory of CNRS and Sorbonne Université. She is expert in the study of galaxies and their distribution at large scales. She received in 1988 the CNRS bronze medal for her role in the discovery of the "cell-like" structure of the galaxy distribution. These results led to a considerable renewal of interest in the mapping of the large-scale structure of the Universe and in the theoretical and numerical simulations of galaxy and structure formation.
The research performed by Valérie de Lapparent is based on the observation of distant galaxies which she makes using the large telescopes at european and french-american facilities (ESO in Chile, TCFH in Hawaii), and analyzes at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. She also makes use of the observations extracted from the large community surveys acquired in service mode (SDSS, CFHTLS). The exploration of these data allows her to characterize galaxies by their shapes, sizes and emission, in order to understand how galaxies formed and evolved during their journey along the cosmic web.
Large imaging and spectroscopic surveys containing all existing galaxy types are needed to study how the interactions of galaxies with each other,as well as with the intergalactic environment, affect the rate at which they form stars, a key indicator of the age of galaxies. The tools she uses are the automatic modeling of profiles (SExtractor, SourceXtractor++), the exploration of parameter spaces by Bayesian inference, and the massive compression of data by deep learning via neural networks.
These analyses are prerequisites for examining how the different galaxy populations are clustered and evolve within the dark matter halos and at large scales. This research is essential for testing and specifying the models describing the evolution of galaxies and large-scale structures.
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