Françoise Combes

Astrophysicist at Paris Observatory, Françoise Combes was deputy director of the physics laboratory at the École normale supérieure from 1985 to 1989. She was president of the Société française d'astronomie et d'astrophysique (2002-2004) and headed the CNRS National Galaxies Program (2001-2008). She has been Professor of Galaxies and Cosmology at the Collège de France since 2014. She has been editor of the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003. Her research focuses on the formation and evolution of galaxies, in a cosmological context. Through her numerical simulations, she was the first to discover the mechanism by which bulges form in spiral galaxies, through vertical resonances of stellar bars. She also pioneered molecular absorptions in front of distant quasars, leading to constraints on the variation of fundamental constants. She was awarded the 2020 CNRS Gold Medal and the 2021 Pour les Femmes et la Science L'Oréal-Unesco International Prize.

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The barred spiral galaxy NGC 1433, seen with the Hubble Space Telescope, and inset top right, the center mapped in the CO(3-2) line with the ALMA millimeter interferometer. The blue color traces young stars, and the orange-yellow color molecular gas. The outer ring corresponds to the main internal Lindblad resonance of the bar, and ALMA has discovered another ring inside, corresponding to the second Lindblad resonance. The bar produces torques on the gas, and thus helps power the central black hole, which exists at the center of every galaxy.