Valentin Le Gouellec

Affiliation: NASA Ames Research Center (ARC)/ Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU)

Email: valentin.j.legouellec@nasa.gov

Professional Biography

Dr. Valentin Le Gouellec is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow since early 2023. His research focuses on the birth of solar-type stars within local star forming molecular clouds. The protostar evolutionary phase designates the phase during which the nascent stellar embryo accretes most of the star’s final mass, and the future planet hosting disk forms. His work at Ames consists in characterizing the physics and chemical processes at the origin of the near-infrared emission of protostars, using ground-based (Keck, VLT) and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope.

Before his NPP fellowship, Dr. Valentin Le Gouellec was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stratospheric Observatory for Far-Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a NASA Ames mission, ran by USRA (now terminated). He had the chance to fly and observe with SOFIA, the last observational facility that accessed the far-infrared part of the spectrum.

He did his PhD between the University of Paris, CEA Saclay laboratory, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, where he studied the millimeter polarized dust emission of protostars with ALMA, the biggest radio telescope interferometer of the world, located in the high plateau of Atacama in Chile.

He is additionally passionate about writing and mountaineering. 

Education

2018 – 2021 Ph.D. in Astronomy, University of Paris, CEA Saclay, France
“Constraining the dust grain alignment mechanism responsible for the (sub-) millimeter dust polarization observed in Class 0 protostellar cores” 
Advisors: Anaëlle J. Maury, Charles L. H. Hull

2018–2020 PhD Studentship
European Southern Observatory, Santiago de Chile, Chile

2014–2018 M.Sc. in Aerospace engineering, Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-Supaero), Toulouse, France
Major: Earth Observation, Space Sciences, and Astrophysics
Minor: Conception and Operation of Space Systems

2016–2017 4thyr. Undergraduate in Aerospace engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom 

2012–2014 2 yrs. Undergraduate, Stanislas preparatory classes, Paris, France

Research Interests

Accretion and ejection mechanisms involved in the evolution of protostars
Role of magnetic fields in low- and high-mass star formation
Dust polarization and dust grain alignment mechanisms
Radio, near-, and mid- infrared atomic and molecular gas emission lines in star forming cores

Publications

Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Thomas, P., Greene, Lynne, A., Hillenbrand., et al., “New insights on the accretion properties of Class 0 protostars from 2 micron spectroscopy,” 2024, ApJ, 966, 91L

Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Andersson, B. -G., et al., “The Origin of Dust Polarization in the Orion Bar,” 2023, ApJ, 951, 97L

Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Maury, A. J., Hull, C. L. H., et al., “Physical conditions for dust grain alignment in Class 0 protostellar cores. II. The role of the radiation field in models that align and disrupt dust grains,” 2023, A&A, 675A.133L

Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Maury, A. J., Hull, C. L. H., “Physical conditions for dust grain alignment in Class 0 protostellar cores. I. Observations of dust polarization and molecular irradiation tracers,” 2023, A&A, 671A.167L

Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Maury, A. J., Guillet, V., Hull, C. L. H., et al., “A statistical analysis of dust polarization properties in ALMA observations of Class 0 protostellar cores,” 2020, A&A, 644A.11L

Le Gouellec, V. J. M., Hull, C. L. H., et al., “Characterizing magnetic field morphologies in three Serpens protostellar cores with ALMA,” 2019, ApJ, 885, 106

Awards & Others

NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow (2022)

Chilean European Southern Observatory studentship Santiago de Chile, Chile (2018)
Best Master Thesis award, ISAE-Supaero, (2018)