By Dr. Ray Butler, Dept. Physics, NUI Galway 

This lecture will delve into the history of the search for extra-solar planets this far as well as providing up to date information on how the search has progressed this far.  The lecture promises to provide a fascinating insight into one of the most exciting areas of astronomy.

Ray Butler was born in Cork in 1971, and has been active in research since 1992, working in optical astronomy (globular star clusters, pulsars, supernova remnants, extra-solar planets, and gamma-ray bursters) and imaging (image processing, deconvolution algorithms, photometry, astrometry, imager calibration, and medical applications). He obtained his B.E. (Elec) at UCC in 1992, and his PhD (Physics) at NUI Galway in 1999. He was awarded two Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships, which he held at the University of Edinburgh (1997-1999), and on his return to NUI Galway after 1999. He was appointed a lecturer in the Physics Dept., NUI Galway in 2001 (turning down an Enterprise Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship in favour of developing a teaching portfolio), and won a promotion from contract to tenured status in 2004. He develops and presents material for the BSc (Physics) and BSc (Physics & Astronomy) degrees. Active in the Astronomy & Astronomical Instrumentation research cluster (part of the inter-departmental Computational Astrophysics Laboratory), he is the principal investigator in the research programmes on globular star clusters, data-processing pipelines, and L3-CCD development. He currently supervises a group of three PhD students in these research programmes.

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