André Brahic

About André Brahic

André BRAHIC is a professor at the University Paris Diderot and at the Atomic Energy Commission (C.E.A.) in Saclay. After studying at the beginning of his career the mass loss of supernovae, phenomena of chaos physics as well as the dynamics and flattening of galaxies, he became a specialist in planetology. He is now one of the world specialists in the dynamics and evolution of planetary rings as well as the formation of the solar system and planetary systems.

He discovered Neptune’s arcs in 1984, which allowed the Voyager probe to photograph them 5 years later. He named them: “Courage, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”. Extending the work of Maxwell and Poincaré, he proposed at the end of the 1970s the first model of velocity dispersion in Saturn’s rings, paving the way for studies on interactions between disks and satellites. He was a member of the imaging team of the Voyager probes exploring the edges of the solar system between 1979 and 1989. He is currently the French member of the imaging team of the American-European Cassini mission which has been exploring the world of Saturn since 2004 and is expected to continue until 2017.

He was one of the pioneers of French planetology by promoting from 1979 space missions to the small bodies of the solar system and by founding the national planetology programme. He was one of the six members of the International Committee responsible for defining the word “planet”, a definition adopted in August 2006 by the International Astronomical Union.

He has been president and member of numerous committees of NASA, the European Space Agency, the Ministry of Research and Education and organisations dedicated to space research, culture or education. In particular, he chaired the Society of French Professional Astronomers (SF2A), the “astronomy” section of the National University Committee and the commission of the International Astronomical Union which brings together the 500 professional astronomers working on the study of the solar system.

He has published nearly 200 articles in specialised journals as well as about ten books. He has received several national and international awards such as the “Carl Sagan” prize from the American Astronomical Society in 2000 and the Jean Perrin prize from the French Physical Society in 2006.

He is the author of very beautiful popular science books that have been bestsellers: in 2012 “Science, an ambition for France”, in 2010 “Of fire and ice, burning planets”, in 2008 “Star lights, the colours of the invisible” (with Isabelle Grenier) and “Children of the Sun, history of our origins”.

He was in 2005 one of the founders of the laboratory “A.I.M. (Astrophysics – Multi-scale Interactions)”, U.M.R. of the University Paris Diderot, the C.N.R.S. and the C.E.A. He had founded in 1992 the laboratory “EUROPA” at the Meudon Observatory and in 1997 the Gamma – Gravitation laboratory at the C.E.A. He is known for his enthusiasm and his action in favour of scientific culture.

His name was given to the asteroid 3488, located 2.8 astronomical units from the Sun and he entered the Petit Larousse in 2009.