Joe Llama | Homepage

Welcome to my home page. Here you can find out everything you could ever possibly want to know about me!

I am currently a PhD student studying Astrophysics at The University of St Andrews under the supervision of Professor Moira Jardine. Our research focus is primarily on stellar magnetic fields and their effect on exoplanets. For more information on my academic career hit the Academic link in the navigation bar above.

Exciting events

NAMchester - 20/03/2012

Back from a great week in Manchester for the 2012 National Astronomy Meeting. Met lots of new people and got to catch up with some old friends. Moira presented my work on stellar spot belt migrations rates which was well received. I also had a poster which won runner up in the poster competition!

Things that go bump in the transit. My poster for NAM 2012. High quality version

Aurora spotted over St Andrews - 23/01/2012

What a fantastic evening, the sky was clear and the aurora watch was set to Minor activity. The aurora indeed came through and I managed to snap a shot of The James Gregory Telescope with the Northern lights illuminating the sky. The image made it onto the BBC and also the School's homepage and 'In the loop magazine'.

The James Gregory telescope and the aurora in the background.

The "domeless" James Gregory - 20/01/2012

With help from David Brown we managed to get a long exposure of the James Gregory with the dome rotated through a full cycle.

The 0.94 m James Gregory Telescope seen "through" its dome by some crafty photographic techniques.

Transiting Santa - 25/12/2011

This year rather than send the generic "Merry Christmas" card I thought I would use my transit code to create an altogether more geeky festive greeting. Check out what would happen should one of the transit surveys detect Santa transiting over a distant star.

The video generated quite a lot of attention with over 10,000 views at last count and even got a mention by the Kepler science team on Facebook!

The shocking environment of hot Jupiters - 18/04/2011

This is our press release from the National Astronomy Meeting in Wales. Based on a series of papers, the last of which was mine describes the observations and modeling of a bow shock around the hot Jupiter WASP-12b. The observations provide a unique opportunity to detect exoplantary magnetic fields and are currently the only way this can be done. As is my way, no science is complete without a video or animation of some form, so here is a simulation of WASP-12b and it's bow shock:

We had a lot of interest in the work and it was featured in numerous science magazines and websites.