Dr Tim D. Pearce Stephen Hawking Fellow, University of Warwick, UK

I am an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in the UK. My work focuses on planetary systems, and in particular how planets, asteroids, comets and dust evolve and interact with each another. Much of my time is spent on mathematical modelling and numerical simulations.
I completed my PhD in 2016 with Mark Wyatt and Grant Kennedy at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK. I then worked outside of academia, as an officer in the Royal Navy and also as the lead mathematician at a software firm. In December 2019 I returned to academia, joining the Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena, Germany. In November 2023 I moved to Warwick as a Prize Fellow, and in May 2024 I paused this to undertake a Stephen Hawking Fellowship.
Outside of work I love pretty much any outdoor activity, as well as travel and history. I am also a die-hard Nintendo fan, perhaps unsurprisingly as an astrophysicist.

‘Debris’ refers to any solid material in a planetary system, other than planets and moons. Asteroids, comets, dust and dwarf planets can all be classified as debris. Since the 1980s this material has been detected around other stars, and we now have instruments powerful enough to resolve debris populations in some of these systems; the left figure above shows an ALMA image of debris around the star Fomalhaut, and the right figure is a Hubble Space Telescope image of debris around AU Microscopii.

Many such ‘debris discs’ are comparable to (although much brighter than) the Asteroid and Kuiper Belts in our own Solar System. In the same way that the number of known exoplanets has greatly increased over recent years, we now know that debris exists around a significant fraction of stars other than our Sun.

However, despite these advances there remain many unanswered questions. How and why do debris discs form? What is their relation to planets? How massive are they? What can they tell us about the early stages of planetary system evolution? Much of my work focuses on these questions.

Planets exert gravitational forces, which can affect debris. Likewise, gravitational forces from debris can affect planets. This interaction produces warps, clumps, spirals and other features in debris discs, transports material between different regions of systems, and causes planet orbits to change. Interesting debris features are observed in many systems, but in most cases the planets responsible are too small to be detected.

One aspect of my work involves constraining the properties of these unseen planets, by examining features observed in debris. This allows us to probe planet parameters in the outer regions of planetary systems, where most planet detection techniques are ineffective. The above image shows a simulation of a planet interacting with debris, where the white ellipse is the planet's orbit and the white point is the star. The planet has induced a spiral in the debris disc, which could potentially be observed.

Examples of my planet-debris-interaction work include Pearce et al. (2022a), Pearce & Wyatt (2014b) and Pearce & Wyatt (2015a).

A significant fraction of main-sequence stars host mysterious near-infrared emission. We think this arises from very small, very hot dust located very close to stars, but we don't understand where it comes from or how it survives. I produce dynamical models to explain this phenomenon. Hot dust lets us probe dynamical processes and material transport in planetary systems, and may need to be mitigated in future missions to image Earth-like exoplanets.

Examples of my hot-dust work include Pearce et al. (2020) and Pearce et al. (2022b).

We can now image large planets far from their host stars, in the outer regions of planetary systems. However, constraining the orbits of these planets is difficult; the planets may take thousands of years to complete a single orbit, so even if we take multiple images over several decades, we would see the planet move a relatively small distance over that time. The above image shows the tentative planet Fomalhaut b, which moves over a very small fraction of its orbit during 8 years of observations.

Astronomers often try to determine the orbits of these planets, but it is unclear how best to do this without missing some potential orbits or making the solution appear more constrained than it actually is. I work on alternative methods to constrain planet orbits from imaging, which reveal all possible orbits and do not unfairly favour some solutions over others.

Examples of my orbital work include Pearce et al. (2015b) and Pearce et al. (2014a).