William Thompson

@wrtastro.bsky.social

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Herzberg Instrument Science Fellow at the National Research Council in Victoria, Canada. Imaging exoplanets and writing #JuliaLang tools.

group photo around an astronomical instrument, inside a lab with a green wall in the background.
a plot of a planet's position vs the star in 2D indicated as coloured lines. The line colour goes towards red or blue as the planet is in front of the star or behind. It is blue on the left, red on the right, and green, indicating 0, at the top and bottom. The separation is about 1000 milliarcseconds left or right increasing to about 1300 at top or bottom, creating an oval.
fringed image of star behind coronagraph
CASCA is pleased to announce Dr. William Thompson as the 2025 recipient of the Plaskett Medal for the most outstanding doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics. Dr. Thompson’s thesis, defended at the University of Victoria in 2023 under the direction of Profs. Falk Herwig and Christian Marois, is entitled, “Lights in Motion: Observing Nearby Planets with Imaging, Wavefront Sensing, Orbital Detection, and Spectroscopy”. The title hints at the breadth of the research described within Dr. Thompson’s thesis work, including developing new computational methods to analyze angular differential imaging observations and employing these methods to discover a new candidate exoplanet around HR 8799; developing the first multi-technique exoplanet finding code that can incorporate radial velocity, astrometry and high-contrast imaging data; carrying out both simulation and laboratory tests of two new techniques for exoplanet imaging; and more. The thesis external examiner notes that, “it is the combination of innovative thinking, rigorous simulation and laboratory testbed results which make the work so impressive.” The software developed as part of Dr. Thompson’s thesis research is publicly available and is already being used by other exoplanet researchers, and his instrumentation development work provides first steps toward possible hardware contributions to the Habitable Worlds Observatory. CASCA is delighted to recognize Dr. Thompson for these outstanding contributions.
A plain text data table that reads: M_pri b_e b_ω b_τ b_P b_i b_Ω b_a b_tp b_mass Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 Float64 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 0.831638 0.168298 3.89686 0.858561 7.21718 0.640533 3.29034 3.51345 59651.7 1.06503 0.795307 0.0308685 5.94108 0.169789 7.28537 0.874402 2.96544 3.48309 57840.3 0.879026 0.849784 0.133792 4.07826 0.885673 7.3039 0.7676 3.17299 3.56694 59751.3 0.962535 0.828249 0.0122253 2.14998 0.58055 7.33537 0.621978 3.60262 3.54694 58943.9 1.11392 0.830251 0.120784 5.83218 0.16658 7.32244 0.914066 3.4074 3.54528 57834.0 0.866626 0.843352 0.105946 4.02053 0.889047 7.3851 0.739503 3.33878 3.58424 59786.6 0.955619 0.843297 0.0298729 0.202907 0.251375 7.37376 0.68507 3.18727 3.58067 58065.5 1.08521 0.842145 0.0804329 5.19621 0.0807889 7.38184 0.878696 3.38147 3.58141 57606.3 0.903373 0.831515 0.0393159 5.18298 0.0626671 7.43359 0.73388 3.33258 3.5833 57558.6 1.16991 0.802696 0.0307339 0.643902 0.324703 7.22671 0.642977 3.42096 3.47524 58245.6 1.01233
predictions of the planet's location on 2025-01-01 shown as 1-sigma contours, broken down by data source. A green ring is shown for the RV data, while a black oval (much more concentrated) shows the planet is likely to be South of the star, about 1-arsecond separation.
Figure showing the RV orbit fit to data staring in 1981 and going until mid 2020. Data from 13 different RV instrument groups are coloured differently.
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Figure showing a the plausible orbits for Eps Eri b, and a panel showing the scale of the orbits relative to the outer debris disk model of Booth et al.
A plot that shows the mass of the binary on the horizontal axis, probability density on the vertical axis, with two curves labelled "inner model" and "outer model" along with the text "agree within: 0.7%, 0.9 sigma, 1 Mjup".
A two-panel figure, showing plausible orbits of the outer companion, then a zoom in (labelled "1000x zoom") to show the inner orbit of the two brown dwarfs.
A graph of GitHub commits by day of the week, with a peak on Wednesday and tails reaching Saturday/Sunday.
Poster with the following text: Julia programming for Astronomy Two day workshop @ AAS 245 Winter Meeting January 11th and 12th - introduction to Julia - data frames - plotting - modelling - high performance - multithreading -create your first package! Register through AAS portal! Questions. Contact pebarrett@gwu.edu
A corner plot showing an MCMC chain - the contours look very blocky.
Sea lions out on a dock
A three storey tall orange serving food. Looks kind of like an old diner.