James Robinson

Postdoctoral research fellow, Queen's University Belfast

My name is James (Jamie) Robinson and I am a postdoc at the Solar System Objects group at QUB. My main work focuses on determining physical properties of asteroids from their phase curves.

Phase Curves with ATLAS

A phase curve describes how the brightness of a solar system body changes with different viewing geometry. A phase curve can be fit by a phase curve model, which depends on the physical properties of the body.

I use data from the ATLAS survey, which scans the sky searching for transient phenomena. As such ATLAS has built up a large database of asteroid photometry which can be used to determine the properties of various populations.

ATLAS eyeballing

As a member of the ATLAS team I eyeball detections of potentially hazardous Near-Earth objects; live from the UK while the telescopes operate during the Hawaiian night. Sometimes I even discover new comets, such as C/2020 H5 (Robinson) .

Binary Formation and Evolution

For my PhD thesis (QUB) I investigated the origin and evolution of binary planetesimals in the outer Solar System. Binaries in the transneptunian region can exhibit unusual properties compared to inner Solar System binaries; such as equal mass & similar colour components on wide orbits. These properties can be explained by formation via gravitational collapse of a pebble cloud, most likely triggered by streaming instability in the early protoplanetary disk. Furthermore, if these binaries formed early on then they would have had to survive the processes of Solar System evolution, such as planetary migration.