Peter R. McCullough

Stay at the IAC: 27/05/2013 to 29/06/2013.

Research line: Exoplanets and Solar System

Prof. Peter R. McCullough currently works at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). He is the founder of the XO Project and discoverer of extrasolar transiting planets, such as XO-1b.

Prof. McCullough earned his PhD in astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. McCullough was a Hubble postdoctoral fellow, and then an assistant professor in the Astronomy Department of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2002 he moved to Baltimore, Maryland to work at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. He also works on the science team of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. In 2009-2010 he was a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Institute d'Astrophysique in Paris.

Soon after the U.S. declassification of the laser beacon adaptive optics technique in 1991, he identified dusty disks around newborn stars, later referred to as proplyds, in observations of the Orion Nebula made with the Starfire Optical Range. Astronomers John Gaustad, McCullough, and David Van Buren with engineer Wayne Rosing mapped the entire southern sky in the hydrogen alpha transition with sufficient sensitivity for decontamination of the Milky Way from the cosmic microwave background. McCullough's modification to the Stromgren sphere model often produces more realistic results than the original.