11-06, 08:30– (US/Arizona), Posters
Thanks to the unrivalled astrometric and photometric performances of Gaia, new impetus has been given to the study of young stars: both from an environmental perspective, as members of comoving star-forming regions, and from an individual perspective, as targets amenable to planet-hunting direct-imaging observations. In addition to this, direct imaging of giant planets and brown dwarfs thanks to ground-based (e.g., VLT) and space-borne (JWST) instruments is providing the community with larger and larger samples of young objects that are already paving the way to a tremendous boost in the understanding of the physics underlying their formation and atmospheric properties.
In view of the large availability of theoretical evolutionary models, both the stellar and the planetary field would benefit from a unified framework that allows a straightforward comparison of physical parameters obtained by different stellar and substellar models.
To this aim, I developed the Manifold Age Determination for Young Stars (MADYS), a flexible Python tool for parameter determination (age, mass, Teff, radius, luminosity etc) of young stellar and substellar objects based on isochronal fitting of observed photometry. MADYS is equipped with automatic modules handling SQL-type queries of input list of stars, the computation of interstellar extinction, the estimate of photometric quality and, finally, the computation of astrophysical parameters and the graphical representation of posterior distributions within the parameter space. More than 250 photometric filters and 20 models are currently available in MADYS, allowing a self-consistent and straightforward comparison of the results obtained by different evolutionary models.
I will introduce here the main features of the tool, which is well documented and has been already employed in ~10 publications.
After completing my PhD in Astronomy in Padua (Italy) in 2022, I started in dec 2022 a 2-yr post-doctoral contract at the Observatory of Paris. My work deals with the search and characterization of giant planets and brown dwarfs around stars observed by imaging using state-of-the-art reduction algorithms, in order to compare their observed and theoretical properties.
I have also worked on a survey with the SPHERE instrument called BEAST, which has identified substellar companions around young B-type stars. My current efforts are part of the general quest to understand the mechanisms of substellar companion formation.