Dr. JJ Kavelaars |
Dr. JJ Kavelaars received his Ph.D. from the Department of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston ON in 1998. He is currently a Senior Research Officer at the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Departments at McMaster University and the University of Victoria. |
| Research Projects | |
| The Kuiper Belt | Beyond the orbit of Neptune lies a vast reservoir of ice cometary material. The chunks and hunks of material in this region range from a few meters to 100s of kilometres in size. As part of the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey team, I am currently actively searching this region of the solar system, attempting to catalogue its contents and map its structure. Mapping the contents of the Kuiper Belt provides the clues needed to model the formation of the Giant Planets of our solar system. |
| Irregular Satellites | Planetary satellites which do not orbit in the planets equatorial plane are called irregular satellites. I am part of the team which discovered 5 irregular moons of the planet Uranus in 1997 and 1999. In 2000 we discovered 8 irregular moons of Saturn. Since then we have gone on to discovery a few dozen satellites orbiting Jupiter and the handful of objects orbiting Neptune. These discoveries have spawned a new era of investigations attempting to explain the formation of irregular satellites. |
| Teaching | This Spring (Jan-Mar 2011) I will be teaching ASTR 255 Planet Formation at the University of Victoria. This course will deal with the basics of planets at a introductory under-graduate level. Students interested in taking this course should contact the Department of Physics and Astronomy Department at UVic. |
| CFHT Legacy Survey | I'm currently the CFHT Archive Scientist in the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, the worlds largest repository (by data volume) of astronomical imaging data. I also serve on the Canadian Telescope time assignment committee and the CASCA sub-committee on Data and Computation. |