Preparing for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to drastically increase our knowledge of the solar system, with over ~6 million new planetesimals expected to be discovered during the course of its ten-year mission. This unprecedented survey of the night sky brings with it unprecedented challenges. A vast amount of community software is in the process of being created for the exploration of the immense amounts of data this survey will produce. I am currently involved in the development of the adler software package that will provide tools and alerts for the analysis of LSST observations of solar system objects.

Planet Hunters NGTS
During my PhD, I led the data analysis of the Planet Hunters NGTS citizen science project. Exoplanet detection using transit surveys relies on many hours of human vetting to search for transit-like signals and filter out false positives. The power of citizen science has been proven by projects such as Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters and Planet Hunters TESS. These platforms present images or light curves from telescopes and utilise classifications from public volunteers to categorise astronomical phenomena, drastically increasing the speed at which researchers can discover new objects such as transiting exoplanets. My research focused on exoplanet detection and measuring the detection efficiencies of the citizen science project hosted at ngts.planethunters.org. Planet Hunters NGTS is the next iteration of the Planet Hunters project, using data from the Next Generation Transit Survey to search for exoplanet candidates missed in the initial searches by the science team.

Biography

Prior to starting my PhD at Queen's, I studied for a BSc in Mathematics, followed by an MSc by Research in Physics, at the University of Warwick. For my Master's project, I investigated the noise propeties of scintillation-dominated light curves from the NGTS telescopes. Atmospheric scintillation is caused by light passing through turbulent regions of the Earth's atmosphere, resulting in changes in intensity of the light received by a telescope. This is more colloquially known as the "twinkling" we see when observing stars with the naked eye.

Publications

Here I list publications where I had a significant contribution, for a full list of publications see: ORCID and NASA ADS.

NGTS-EB-8: A double-lined eclipsing M+M binary discovered by citizen scientists
Sean M. O'Brien, Megan E. Schwamb, Christopher A. Watson et al. 2025, AJ, 170, 316, doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ae0e0d

Planet Hunters NGTS: New Planet Candidates from a Citizen Science Search of the Next Generation Transit Survey Public Data
Sean M. O'Brien, Megan E. Schwamb, Samuel Gill et al. 2024, AJ, 167, 238, doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ad32c8

Scintillation-limited photometry with the 20-cm NGTS telescopes at Paranal Observatory
Sean M. O'Brien, Daniel Bayliss, James Osborn et al. 2022, MNRAS, Vol. 509, Issue 4, Pages 6111-6118, doi:10.1093/mnras/stab3399

Research Interests

• Software development for astronomy
• Outlier detection in solar system bodies
• Exoplanets detection
• Exoplanetary system characterisation
• Atmospheric scintillation