Jonas Biren

Research Focus

Jonas Biren is postdoctoral scientist at Cornell University. After completing his PhD at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Orleans (France), he is now joining the multidisciplinary Carl Sagan Institute (CSI) at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science  and is working with Professor Lisa Kaltenegger (Astronomy) and Professor Esteban Gazel (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) in a project supported by the Heisting-Simons foundation to experimentally explore the composition of exosolar lava planets. With the deployment of James Webb new telescope, new InfraRed (IR) data will become available and to interpret these observations, it is of utmost importance to first understand the radiative properties of magmas. As of today, only few data exist on radiative properties at high temperatures of magma products. Jonas will develop, in the project "Laboratory Exploration of Lava Worlds", a library of experimentally observed spectra of hot and molten surfaces and their potential outgassed atmospheres.