Peter McCullough

Who is Peter McCullough?

Peter R. McCullough is an American astronomer, founder of the XO Project and discoverer of extrasolar transiting planets, such as XO-1b. Soon after the U.S. declassification of the laser beacon adaptive optics technique in 1991, he identified dusty disks around newborn stars, later referred to as proplyds, in observations of the Orion Nebula made with the Starfire Optical Range. Astronomers John Gaustad, McCullough, and David Van Buren with engineer Wayne Rosing mapped the entire southern sky in the hydrogen alpha transition with sufficient sensitivity for decontamination of the Milky Way from the cosmic microwave background. McCullough's modification to the Stromgren sphere model often produces more realistic results than the original.