Astrophysicist
Planétarium
An astrophysicist by training, Auriane Egal earned her doctorate at the Observatoire de Paris in 2017. Since then she has directed and contributed to several meteor observation campaigns through the photo and video networks of the international meteorite observation and recovery consortium known as DOMe/FRIPON, a program whose scientific operations she took over in early 2023.
An adventurer at heart, Auriane has been part of a number of missions in very special contexts, including a meteorite recovery mission in the Atacama Desert, and an observation station installation mission in Sri Lanka. Between 2018 and 2022 she did postdoctoral studies at Western University in Ontario focusing on the modeling of meteoroid flux and the prediction of meteor showers close to the Earth. She collaborates frequently with NASA’s Meteoroids Environment Office (MEO), providing predictions the space agency needs to lessen the threat that meteoroids represent for astronauts and for space missions like Gaia and the James Webb Space Telescope launched in 2021.
An outstanding communicator, she is often called on to explain the astronomical phenomena she studies to the public, both in the media and at international conferences.
For a while, Auriane has been officially part of the world’s largest meteor research team – the Western Meteor Physics Group at Western University – as assistant professor.
Publications
- Egal, A., Wiegert, P., and Brown, P. G. and Vida, D. (2023). Modelling the 2022 τ-Herculid outburst, ApJ.
- Egal, A., Wiegert, P., and Brown, P. G. (2022). A proposed alternative dynamical history for 2P/Encke that explains the Taurid meteoroid complex, MNRAS.
- Egal, A., Brown, P. G., Wiegert, P., and Kipreos, Y. (2022). An observational synthesis of the Taurid meteor complex, MNRAS.