I am working as a post-doc in the Millimeter & Submillimeter Astronomy Group, directed by Prof. Karl Menten, at the MPIfR, Bonn, Germany. My research interests mainly focus on the processes of star formation, and in particular, on observing projects of massive star forming sites in our galaxy. I have carried out several observing runs with the APEX and IRAM 30m telescopes.
More informations on specific topics are available on the
following pages.
I did my PhD thesis in the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, with Alain Omont as my supervisor. The subject of my work was the analysis of the recent massive star formation in the Galaxy based on the ISOGAL infrared survey [1].
A first part of this work dealt with the treatment of the ISOGAL data. This resulted in the publication of a Point Source Catalogue containing about 100,000 entries, with magnitude measurements at 7 and/or 15 microns, complemented with near-infrared data from the DENIS survey at 0.8, 1.2 and 2.2 micron [2].
This database is dominated by late evolved stars, but after a careful analysis of these data, I was able to establish robust criteria to extract a population of a few hundreds young stellar objects [3, 4]. In addition, the mid-infrared photometry provides rough estimates of their luminosities, from which an approximate idea of their masses can be infered. Then, the compilation of these data and additional infrared data from the MSX survey resulted in an estimation of the recent average star formation rate, in the inner Galactic Bulge (or Central Molecular Zone - CMZ), of order 0.2 solar mass per year [5].
Main references:
[1] Omont A., Gilmore G., et al. 2003, A&A 403, 975
[2] Schuller F., Ganesh S., Messineo M., et al. 2003, A&A 403, 955
[3] Felli M., Testi L., Schuller F., Omont A. 2002, A&A 392, 971
[4] Schuller F., Omont A., Glass I.S., Schultheis M., Egan M.P., Price S.D. 2006, A&A 453, 535
[5] My PhD thesis is available as a PDF file from the CCSD web site