Tim Lister

Senior Scientist

Tim Lister hails from the city of Manchester in the UK and obtained a MSci and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of St. Andrews in 1997 and 2000 respectively.Following his PhD he worked as a Linux sysadmin in the Astronomy Group and then joined the SuperWASP Project as a postdoc. During that time he substantially contributed to the development of the pipelines and data reduction systems which finally culminated in the first WASP extrasolar planet in 2006. Since then the SuperWASP project and instruments have gone on to discover over forty extrasolar planets making it one of the most successful planet search programs.

In 2006, Tim moved to the Keele Astrophysics Group  to work on setting up SuperWASP-South which would search for planets in the southern hemisphere from  SAAO in South Africa. Tim joined LCO as a Project Scientist/Astronomer and moved out to sunny Santa Barbara in Feb. 2007. While at LCO he is involved with developing the pipeline and archives which will handle the data coming from LCO's many telescopes and continues to do research on extrasolar planets, magnetic activity on binary stars and Solar System objects.

A lot of my work at the minute is concerned with following up new asteroid discoveries from PanSTARRS and other NEO surveys in both the inner and outer Solar System. My follow-up using LCO's telescopes have confirmed over 250 new Near Earth Objects (NEOs) from PanSTARRS and over a hundred other objects including several comets and a Centaur. In the course of this follow-up I have discovered almost 100 new asteroids in the Main Belt and a Jupiter Trojan - one of the two families of asteroids that are trapped in Jupiter's Lagrange Points so they are always 60 degrees ahead or behind of Jupiter in it's orbit.

Here is some of my work on obtaining light curves and rotation rates for radar-targeted NEOs.

I have also given a public talk on "Asteroids, NEOs, Comets and Meteors" and that is available here