Erwan QUINTIN
ESA Research Fellow -
High Energy Astrophysics
ABOUT ME
I'm an ESA Research Fellow at ESAC, Madrid.
My work has been mainly focused on the transient sources hidden in the X-ray archives: trying to find the ones we have missed, and improving our ability to catch new ones.
Scientific Interests
Transient Detection
While we usually imagine the stars and the sky as a fixed background to our lives, this is very far from the truth ! The Universe is filled with rare, bright and transient events. My work has been focused on catching them as soon as possible, especially in the pipeline of the XMM-Newton telescope.
Archival Data Mining
Astronomers are very careful about their data - everything that has ever been taken a picture of is stored online in available archives. A part of my work has been to mine into these treasure troves, searching for rare and elusive events that we might have seen in the past - but the true value of which was missed...
Tidal Disruption Events & Quasi-Periodic Eruptions
I mainly focus on two types of transient accretion events: Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs), which are huge months-long explosions after the destruction of a star by the tidal forces around a black hole - and Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs), which are mysterious 1h-long repeated bursts that seem to be linked to TDEs (?)
If you want more details, you can take a look at the "Research Topics" page !