Overview
Background
I research extrasolar planets - planets around other stars - and focus on developing and applying new data science approaches for detecting and characterizing them. I have taken nearly every approach to exoplanet and stellar observation, including transits, radial velocities, direct imaging, and asteroseismology.
As an ARC DECRA Fellow I'm mainly working on exoplanet direct imaging with the James Webb Space Telescope, and especially how we can use differentiable & probabilistic programming to enhance data analysis to detect faint objects in noisy data. I also work on radio astronomy to study planets' magnetic interactions with their host stars, and using radiocarbon in tree rings as a tracer of long term solar activity.
I grew up in Sydney, New South Wales, and studied for my Honours and Masters at the University of Sydney. I studied abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2017 I completed my DPhil in Astrophysics at Balliol College, Oxford. From 2017-20 was a NASA Sagan Fellow at the NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and Center for Data Science. I'm now a Lecturer in Astrophysics and DECRA Fellow at the University of Queensland.
I'm into open source, open science, and climate action. I was a member of the winning Balliol College team in the 2016-17 series of University Challenge on BBC2, with the wonderful Joey Goldman, Freddy Potts, and Jacob Lloyd. Sometimes I write: see my latest piece in The Monthly, about the possible discovery of phosphine on Venus.
Availability
- Dr Benjamin Pope is:
- Available for supervision
- Media expert
Fields of research
Qualifications
- Bachelor (Honours) of Science (Advanced), University of Sydney
- Masters (Coursework) of Science, University of Sydney
- Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oxford
Research interests
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Exoplanets
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Stellar Astrophysics
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Machine Learning
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Interferometry
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Image Processing
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Radio Astronomy
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Astrobiology
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Radiocarbon
Works
Search Professor Benjamin Pope’s works on UQ eSpace
Featured
2021
Journal Article
Kernel phase and coronagraphy with automatic differentiation
Pope, Benjamin J. S., Pueyo, Laurent, Xin, Yinzi and Tuthill, Peter G. (2021). Kernel phase and coronagraphy with automatic differentiation. The Astrophysical Journal, 907 (1) 40, 1-14. doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/abcb00
Featured
2020
Journal Article
No massive companion to the coherent radio-emitting M Dwarf GJ 1151
Pope, Benjamin J. S., Bedell, Megan, Callingham, Joseph R., Vedantham, Harish K., Snellen, Ignas A. G., Price-Whelan, Adrian M. and Shimwell, Timothy W. (2020). No massive companion to the coherent radio-emitting M Dwarf GJ 1151. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 890 (2) L19, L19. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab5b99
Featured
2020
Journal Article
Coherent radio emission from a quiescent red dwarf indicative of star-planet interaction
Vedantham, H. K., Callingham, J. R., Shimwell, T. W., Tasse, C., Pope, B. J. S., Bedell, M., Snellen, I., Best, P., Hardcastle, M. J., Haverkorn, M., Mechev, A., O'Sullivan, S. P., Rottgering, H. J. A. and White, G. J. (2020). Coherent radio emission from a quiescent red dwarf indicative of star-planet interaction. Nature Astronomy, 4 (6), 577-583. doi: 10.1038/s41550-020-1011-9
Featured
2019
Journal Article
The K2 Bright Star Survey. I. Methodology and data release
Pope, Benjamin J. S., White, Timothy R., Farr, Will M., Yu, Jie, Greklek-McKeon, Michael, Huber, Daniel, Aerts, Conny, Aigrain, Suzanne, Bedding, Timothy R., Boyajian, Tabetha, Creevey, Orlagh L. and Hogg, David W. (2019). The K2 Bright Star Survey. I. Methodology and data release. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 245 (1) ARTN 8, 8. doi: 10.3847/1538-4365/ab3d29
Featured
2019
Journal Article
The Kepler Smear Campaign: Light Curves for 102 Very Bright Stars
Pope, Benjamin J. S., Davies, Guy R., Hawkins, Keith, White, Timothy R., Stokholm, Amalie, Bieryla, Allyson, Latham, David W., Lucey, Madeline, Aerts, Conny, Aigrain, Suzanne, Antoci, Victoria, Bedding, Timothy R., Bowman, Dominic M., Caldwell, Douglas A., Chontos, Ashley, Esquerdo, Gilbert A., Huber, Daniel, Jofre, Paula, Murphy, Simon J., van Reeth, Timothy, Aguirre, Victor Silva and Yu, Jie (2019). The Kepler Smear Campaign: Light Curves for 102 Very Bright Stars. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 244 (1) 18. doi: 10.3847/1538-4365/ab2c04
Featured
2019
Journal Article
Exoplanet transits with next-generation radio telescopes
Pope, Benjamin J. S., Withers, Paul, Callingham, Joseph R. and Vogt, Marissa F. (2019). Exoplanet transits with next-generation radio telescopes. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 484 (1), 648-658. doi: 10.1093/mnras/sty3512
Featured
2018
Journal Article
Anisotropic winds in a Wolf-Rayet binary identify a potential gamma-ray burst progenitor
Callingham, J. R., Tuthill, P. G., Pope, B. J. S., Williams, P. M., Crowther, P. A., Edwards, M., Norris, B. and Kedziora-Chudczer, L. (2018). Anisotropic winds in a Wolf-Rayet binary identify a potential gamma-ray burst progenitor. Nature Astronomy, 3 (1), 82-87. doi: 10.1038/s41550-018-0617-7
Featured
2017
Journal Article
Beyond the Kepler/K2 bright limit: variability in the seven brightest members of the Pleiades
White, T. R., Pope, B. J. S., Antoci, V., Papics, P. I., Aerts, C., Gies, D. R., Gordon, K., Huber, D., Schaefer, G. H., Aigrain, S., Albrecht, S., Barclay, T., Barentsen, G., Beck, P. G., Bedding, T. R., Andersen, M. Fredslund, Grundahl, F., Howell, S. B., Ireland, M. J., Murphy, S. J., Nielsen, M. B., Aguirre, V. Silva and Tuthill, P. G. (2017). Beyond the Kepler/K2 bright limit: variability in the seven brightest members of the Pleiades. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 471 (3), 2882-2901. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stx1050
Featured
2016
Journal Article
Transiting exoplanet candidates from K2 Campaigns 5 and 6
Pope, Benjamin J. S., Parviainen, Hannu and Aigrain, Suzanne (2016). Transiting exoplanet candidates from K2 Campaigns 5 and 6. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 461 (4), 3399-3409. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stw1373
Featured
2016
Journal Article
Photometry of very bright stars with Kepler and K2 smear data
Pope, B. J. S., White, T. R., Huber, D., Murphy, S. J., Bedding, T. R., Caldwell, D. A., Sarai, A., Aigrain, S. and Barclay, T. (2016). Photometry of very bright stars with Kepler and K2 smear data. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 455 (1), L36-L40. doi: 10.1093/mnrasl/slv143
2024
Journal Article
Astrometry and Precise Radial Velocities Yield a Complete Orbital Solution for the Nearby Eccentric Brown Dwarf LHS 1610 b
Fitzmaurice, Evan, Stefánsson, Guđmundur, Kavanagh, Robert D., Mahadevan, Suvrath, Cañas, Caleb I., Winn, Joshua N., Robertson, Paul, Ninan, Joe P., Albrecht, Simon, Callingham, J. R., Cochran, William D., Delamer, Megan, Ford, Eric B., Kanodia, Shubham, Lin, Andrea S. J., Marcussen, Marcus L., Pope, Benjamin J. S., Ramsey, Lawrence W., Roy, Arpita, Vedantham, Harish and Wright, Jason T. (2024). Astrometry and Precise Radial Velocities Yield a Complete Orbital Solution for the Nearby Eccentric Brown Dwarf LHS 1610 b. The Astronomical Journal, 168 (3) 140, 140. doi: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad57be
2024
Conference Publication
Aperture masking interferometry with JWST: calibration and observing strategies
Pope, Benjamin J. S., Desdoigts, Louis, Blakely, Dori, Tuthill, Peter G. and Ray, Shrishmoy (2024). Aperture masking interferometry with JWST: calibration and observing strategies. SPIE. doi: 10.1117/12.3020039
2024
Conference Publication
Differentiable modelling and data analysis for the JWST Aperture Masking Interferometer
Desdoigts, Louis, Pope, Benjamin J. S. and Tuthill, Peter G. (2024). Differentiable modelling and data analysis for the JWST Aperture Masking Interferometer . SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Yokohama, Japan, 16-22 June 2024. Bellingham, WA, United States: SPIE. doi: 10.1117/12.3020303
2024
Conference Publication
Strategies to mitigate effects of pointing error for the TOLIMAN space telescope
Charles, Max, Langford, Connor J., Desdoigts, Louis C., Crous, Fred, Luk, Clarissa J., Pope, Benjamin J., Betters, Christopher H. and Tuthill, Peter G. (2024). Strategies to mitigate effects of pointing error for the TOLIMAN space telescope. SPIE. doi: 10.1117/12.3019548
2024
Conference Publication
Getting to know the neighbours: Earth analogues in Alpha Centauri with the TOLIMAN space telescope
Tuthill, Peter G., Betters, Christopher, Charles, Max, Crous, Fred, Deagan, Conaire, Desdoigts, Louis, Doelman, David S., George, Mark, Grattan, Kyran, Guyon, Olivier, Holland, Thomas, Klupar, Peter, Langford, Connor J., Larkin, Kieran G., Luk, Clarissa J., Montet, Ben, Nelson, Jack, Pope, Benjamin, Piroscia, Grace, Snik, Frans, Taras, Adam K., Wong, Alison and Worden, Simon P. (2024). Getting to know the neighbours: Earth analogues in Alpha Centauri with the TOLIMAN space telescope. SPIE. doi: 10.1117/12.3019256
2024
Journal Article
Coronagraphic Data Post-processing Using Projections on Instrumental Modes
Xin, Yinzi, Pueyo, Laurent, Laugier, Romain, Pogorelyuk, Leonid, Douglas, Ewan S., Pope, Benjamin J. S. and Cahoy, Kerri L. (2024). Coronagraphic Data Post-processing Using Projections on Instrumental Modes. The Astrophysical Journal, 963 (2) 96, 96. doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad1879
2024
Journal Article
Phenomenology and periodicity of radio emission from the stellar system AU Microscopii
Bloot, S., Callingham, J. R., Vedantham, H. K., Kavanagh, R. D., Pope, B. J. S., Climent, J. B., Guirado, J. C., Peña-Moñino, L. and Pérez-Torres, M. (2024). Phenomenology and periodicity of radio emission from the stellar system AU Microscopii. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 682 A170, 1-16. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202348065
2024
Journal Article
Reconstructing Sunspot Number by Forward-Modelling Open Solar Flux
Owens, Mathew J., Lockwood, Mike, Barnard, Luke A., Usoskin, Ilya, Hayakawa, Hisashi and Pope, Benjamin J. S. (2024). Reconstructing Sunspot Number by Forward-Modelling Open Solar Flux. Solar Physics, 299 (1) 3. doi: 10.1007/s11207-023-02241-3
2023
Journal Article
Differentiable optics with ∂Lux: I - deep calibration of flat field and phase retrieval with automatic differentiation
Desdoigts, Louis, Pope, Benjamin J. S., Dennis, Jordan and Tuthill, Peter G. (2023). Differentiable optics with ∂Lux: I - deep calibration of flat field and phase retrieval with automatic differentiation. Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, 9 (2) 028007. doi: 10.1117/1.JATIS.9.2.028007
2023
Journal Article
JWST/NIRCam discovery of the First Y+Y brown dwarf binary: WISE J033605.05–014350.4
Calissendorff, Per, De Furio, Matthew, Meyer, Michael, Albert, Loïc, Aganze, Christian, Ali-Dib, Mohamad, Bardalez Gagliuffi, Daniella C., Baron, Frederique, Beichman, Charles A., Burgasser, Adam J., Cushing, Michael C., Faherty, Jacqueline Kelly, Fontanive, Clémence, Gelino, Christopher R., Gizis, John E., Greenbaum, Alexandra Z., Kirkpatrick, J. Davy, Leggett, Sandy K., Martinache, Frantz, Mary, David, N’Diaye, Mamadou, Pope, Benjamin J. S., Roellig, Thomas, Sahlmann, Johannes, Sivaramakrishnan, Anand, Thorngren, Daniel Peter, Ygouf, Marie and Vandal, Thomas (2023). JWST/NIRCam discovery of the First Y+Y brown dwarf binary: WISE J033605.05–014350.4. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 947 (2) L30, 1-6. doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/acc86d
Supervision
Availability
- Dr Benjamin Pope is:
- Available for supervision
Before you email them, read our advice on how to contact a supervisor.
Available projects
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Studying Stellar Flares and Cosmic Explosions - using Tree Rings!
Honours Projects Available
Radiocarbon dating is used by archaeologists to determine the ages of wooden artefacts and remains of living things, by measuring how much carbon-13 has decayed to carbon-12 since the material last took in fresh carbon from the air. The amount of carbon-13 in the atmosphere has slowly varied over time due to solar activity and volcanic eruptions, so to calibrate their radiocarbon dates, archaeologists use precise measurements of tree rings of known age. With alternating patterns of slow and fast growth, tree rings form a barcode pattern that can be matched to libraries stretching back millennia, giving us precise radiocarbon references for almost any year since the last Ice Age.
In 2012, a remarkable discovery was made by Fusa Miyake: in 774 AD, there was a huge spike in radiocarbon all over the world, that decayed over the course of a year or two, and may have been associated with powerful aurorae noted by mediaeval monks. It was almost certainly astrophysical in origin. Now several 'Miyake events' have been discovered, and astronomers wonder: was this a powerful solar flare? A supernova? Or the result of a 'magnetar burst', the powerful blast of a magnetised neutron star rearranging itself.
New radiocarbon data in the IntCal20 record are ripe for analysis, by statistically digging into the vast new dataset to find new Miyake events hiding in the noise. We can then determine the true rate of their occurrence, their amplitude and timing, and help narrow down the astrophysical origin of this event. This is an ideal Honours project for a student with strong Python skills and an interest in statistics and interdisciplinary studies.
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The Dawn of Exoplanet Radio Astronomy
Apply for PhD Positions through RTP
Honours Projects Available
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered with optical astronomy, whether by using the Doppler effect to see the planet pulling its star back and forth (the radial velocity method, which won Didier Queloz & Michel Mayor the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics), or looking for the dip in brightness as a planet passes in front of a star (the transit method). In our Solar System, the Sun, Earth, and the gas giants are bright sources of radio waves, which tell us a great deal about their magnetic fields and interactions, and for decades astronomers have searched for these effects in more distant planetary systems. Only a couple of the closest stars have been detected in radio waves - otherwise most radio sources are exotic stellar remnants, or black holes at the centres of galaxies. A handful of planets have been discovered by radio astronomy around neutron stars, but the search for radio emission from exoplanets around ordinary stars has until recently not yielded results.
A controversial new discovery by the LOFAR radio telescope in Europe may have opened the window to an important new way to discover and understand exoplanets. LOFAR has found the nearby old, quiet red dwarf GJ 1151 was found to emit circularly polarized radio waves, which we have interpreted as evidence of star-planet magnetic interaction. RV instruments have searched for such a short-period planet, with inconclusive and controversial results. There are other systems we don't believe to be from planetary interactions, but might be new and interesting stellar astrophysics. With many more detections on the way from LOFAR, this could be the beginning of exoplanet radio astronomy. LOFAR is a pathfinder for the recently-approved Square Kilometre Array to be built in Australia, which will be nearly an order of magnitude more sensitive, with the potential to discover hundreds or thousands of these systems.
I have been involved in this project from the beginning, particularly in optical follow-up to search for these planets and understand these stars with ground-based telescopes and satellite data. I have also published theoretical work on what to expect from exoplanet radio observations. There are Honours and PhD projects available in:
- Helping radial-velocity and TESS photometry follow-up of radio-detected stars
- Theoretical predictions of discoveries with the SKA
These would be great projects for students wanting to do a lot of classical observational astronomy, or who want to get to grips with plasma physics.
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Designing Particle Accelerators with Automatic Differentiation
An Honours project offered in collaboration with Dr Tessa Charles, University of Liverpool, UK.
In a recent paper, our group showed you could use the technology underlying deep learning - automatic differentiation - to design complicated optical systems. Using software like TensorFlow or Google Jax, you can calculate exact derivatives of the outputs of almost any numerical code - such as a physics simulation. This means if you can simulate a system, you can design improvements by gradient descent - or roll it together with a neural network for 'simulation intelligence' machine learning!
With my collaborator Tessa Charles, we think we can apply these ideas beyond just optics, and improve particle accelerator technology.
The simplest particle accelerator component to model and optimize, we think, would be a "bunch compressor" - a set of just 4 dipole magnets that bends a bunch of particles in a beam out and back again, compressing it longitudinally. We would have to simulate a Monte Carlo particle transport model accounting for the "microbunching instability", in which electron bunches self-interact via synchrotron radiation. Then we should be able to optimize magnet settings to achieve tighter particle bunches - and a proof of concept for how to design the next generation of particle accelerators.
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Optical Design and Data Analysis with Automatic Differentiation
Apply for PhD Positions through RTP
Honours Projects Available
Looking for a planet next to a star is like looking for a firefly next to a searchlight - a planet might be millions of times fainter if you're lucky, and the Earth would be billions of times fainter than the Sun to distant astronomers. The problem gets worse: if you shine a laser at a wall, you'll notice you get a big cloud of speckles around the central dot. The same thing happens looking at a star with a telescope: any optical distortions introduce clouds of speckles that spread starlight out over a wide area. Our pale blue dot would be completely washed out with stray light from the Sun, and a key challenge in astronomy is figuring out ways to manage and suppress starlight to see faint objects nearby.
Many optical instruments exist for doing this - for example coronagraphs and interferometers - but they are a challenge to design and implement. Alternatively, you can use plain old telescopes and try to correct the speckles in post-processing on a computer. This is going to be hugely important for the new ten-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope to fulfil its promises.
The key technology that underlies machine learning is automatic differentiation - you want to train a neural network with a million parameters, so you want to calculate exact derivatives of the loss function and use gradient descent. Thanks to the massive investment in machine learning from tech giants like Google, there are now software packages like TensorFlow and Jax that let you differentiate essentially any numerical functions you can write in (say) Python.
We can now use this to optimize optical systems by gradient descent - the shapes and sizes of mirrors, the patterns on phase plates, and many other things. We can also use the same software to help generate better post-processing corrections.
This is an opportunity for pretty open-ended, computationally-intensive PhD and Honours projects for students with an interest in machine learning, computer science, and high precision astronomy. You might:
- Simulate and optimize coronagraphs
- Measure the warping of the Hubble Space Telescope from archival data
- Help better understand and commission the James Webb Space Telescope optics!
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Optimizing Data Analysis with the MARVEL Radial Velocity Instrument
We've recently been very excited to receive an ARC LIEF grant to join the international MARVEL radial velocity instrument consortium, building a four-telescope array in the Canary Islands for exoplanet hunting. There is huge potential for enhancing the instrument's precision and detecting hitherto inaccessible planets using software, whether based on deterministic physics or machine learning (or preferably both). For example, consider the Excalibur pipeline for high precision wavelength calibration (Zhao et al, 2021) or the Wobble pipeline for nonparametrically separating out stellar templates, telluric spectral lines, and precise radial velocities from HARPS data (Bedell et al, 2019).
There are a range of possibilities for Honours or PhD projects expanding on these ideas to enhance MARVEL and other instruments, and use this to find exoplanets!
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SETI - Fermi Paradox and Interstellar Colonization
There are pretty open-ended projects, only at Honours level, available in modelling interstellar and intergalactic travel and colonization for understanding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the Fermi Paradox. For example - how easy is intergalactic travel, really, in an expanding universe? Full relativistic calculations of this would shed light on whether recent studies, suggesting 'grabby aliens' could rapidly conquer the whole universe, are realistic. As another example - what would our ability be to resist colonization of our own solar system by an external civilization? There is an asymmetry here - where it takes enormous energy to achieve interstellar travel, planetary defence against natural asteroids and comets in our own solar system is already within our captabilities. How easily would this be adapted to face hostile efforts - and what consequences would this have politically, legally, and for the Fermi Paradox?
Supervision history
Current supervision
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Doctor Philosophy
Observing Naked-Eye Stars and their Planets with TESS
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Tamara Davis
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Doctor Philosophy
Naked-Eye Stars and Their Planets with TESS
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Shrishmoy Ray
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Doctor Philosophy
Weighing supermassive black holes with the Dark Energy Survey
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Tamara Davis
Media
Enquiries
Contact Dr Benjamin Pope directly for media enquiries about:
- Astronomy
- Astrophysics
- Exoplanets
- Physics
- Planets
- Stars
- Telescopes
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