James McCormac
About me
I am an Assistant Professor working on transiting exoplanets and space domain awareness. I obtained my PhD from Queen's University, Belfast in 2012. The main focus of my PhD was the prototyping phase of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). I worked at the ING, La Palma between 2009-2014 as a Telescope Operator and Support Astronomer. In 2014 I joined Warwick as the NGTS operations postdoc. Since 2018 I've been working at the PLATO Data Centre (PDC) at Warwick focusing on the removal of systematic noise for the PLATO mission. My group currently consists of:
Andreas HajigeorghiouLink opens in a new window: Postdoc PLATO Data Centre - Removal of systematic noise in PLATO light curves
Phineas WhitlockLink opens in a new window: 3rd year PhD student - Developing optical parallax techniques for satellite orbit characterisation
Taf Zivave (Co-supervised with Ingrid Pelisoli): 2nd year PhD student - Eclipsing White Dwarfs in NGTS
PLATO
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations (PLATO)Link opens in a new window is a European Space Agency medium class mission to be launched in 2026 with the goal of discovering and characterising Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Below is a rendering of the spacecraft. My contribution to the mission is the data centre focusing on the removal of systematic noise.
The 6 cameras within each group are co-pointed to the same patch of sky. The 4 camera groups overlap with one another to produce the combined footprint shown above. Therefore, different stars will be observed with either 6, 12, 18 or 24 cameras depending on their location in the field of view. Combining the light curves from multiple cameras increases the SNR of the final light curve and also allows us to better disentangle real astrophysical signals from systematic noise. And of course, we cannot be a serious space telescope without a LEGO model! https://platomission.com/2019/06/03/plato-lego-model/
Space Domain Awareness
Accurate orbital parameters for satellites and space debris are becoming evermore important in the new era of satellite mega constellations (e.g. SpaceX Starlink). Precise tracking of satellites requires measuring their position and velocity in 3 dimensions. Optical measurements traditionally obtain 2 dimensional information only (position on the sky) and lack the height of the satellite above the Earth. Together with Dr. Paul Chote and Prof. Don Pollacco we are developing a new method of measuring accurate distances to satellites. By using pairs of optical observations obtained from different locations on the ground and employing the parallax technique we can obtain accurate heights with the goal of improving orbital parameters for the targets. My PhD student Phineas Whitlock has been developing the optical parallax technique in Oct 2023. We have a stationary telescope on La Palma and Phineas has been developed a new portable system that has been deployed at multiple locations in the Canary Islands during summer 2024 and 2025 to obtain the parallax measurements. Analysis of the data is ongoing and we expect the initial publication in late 2025.
GOTO
I am an APM PMQ qualified project manager (part-time) on the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)Link opens in a new window project. GOTO is designed to survey large areas of sky rapidly with the goal of measuring the optical flashes associated with the merger of binary neutron star/black hole systems. The GOTO network consists of 4 telescope nodes, two on La Palma and two at Siding Springs. Each node contains 8x40cm telescopes on a common mount. The focus of this work has been delivering the second telescope node on La Palma and developing the southern installation at Siding Springs Observatory, Australia.
NGTS
I previously worked on the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS)Link opens in a new window as the operations postdoc (2014-2018). NGTS is a robotic observatory dedicated to transiting exoplanet science. The facility consists of 12x20cm telescopes, each on an independently steerable mount. It is located in the southern hemisphere at ESO's Paranal Observatory, Chile. NGTS achieves a low level of systematic noise partly thanks to our extremely stable autoguiding method (Donuts). By combining light curves from multiple telescopes NGTS is able suppress atmospheric scintillation noise and perform photometry comparable to space-based telescopes.
My PhD student Taf Zivave (co-supervised with Ingrid Pelisoli) is currently mining the NGTS archive in search for eclipsing White Dwarfs. WD binaries are interesting targets as they help us understand post-common envelope binary evolution. They are also theorised to be progenitors for Type 1a supernovae. White dwarf binaries are also expected to be important sources of gravitational waves for the upcoming LISA mission. Eclipsing WDs were inefficiently found during the search for transiting exoplanets prompting the need for a dedicated survey. Taf's PhD is focused on conducting a robust and complete survey of all eclipsing WDs in NGTS.
Teaching
Along with Dr. Paul Chote and Dr. Daniel Bayliss we have develop a new 3rd year undergraduate lab experiment at the new Marsh Observatory on campus. The students learn observational astronomy techniques (target selection, planning, data reduction and photometry) and characterise stars on the main sequence of a chosen open cluster. We're currently exploring ideas for new lab experiments for the coming years.
In the 25/26 academic year I am supervising an MPhys project targeting unusual long-period transients in the NGTS data archive. More information can be found on Moodle
Publications
A list of my publications can be found here
Write to:
Dr. James McCormac
Department of Physics,
University of Warwick,
Gibbet Hill Road
Coventry
CV4 7AL
UK
Office: Milburn House F43
