I study the dynamics of the solar system and of planetary systems, and I build the methods that find and track small bodies in large surveys. I am a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a Lecturer on Astronomy at Harvard. From 2015 to 2021 I was Director of the Minor Planet Center.
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, MS 51, Cambridge, MA 02138
mholman@cfa.harvard.edu ·
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Current work
- The outer solar system with Rubin Observatory. In the first year of Vera C. Rubin Observatory data, our searches found about 1,500 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, all reported to the Minor Planet Center.
- Faint trans-Neptunian objects from space. Deep searches with JWST and Hubble reach objects near 10 km in diameter. With the Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey we expect to find about a thousand more.
- Precise orbits. ASSIST computes ephemeris-quality orbits for the precision that modern surveys require.
- Orbit fitting at survey scale. layup fits orbits for the millions of solar system objects that Rubin Observatory will observe.
Earlier contributions
- N-body integrators. With Jack Wisdom, the symplectic mapping now known as the Wisdom–Holman map, the standard method for long-term integrations of planetary systems.
- Transit timing variations. With Norman Murray, the proposal to detect planets through changes in transit times; in 2010, Kepler-9, the first system confirmed this way.
- Stability and chaos. Maps of stable regions among the giant planets and in binary star systems, and, with Norman Murray, the overlap of resonances as the source of chaos in asteroid and planetary orbits.
- Linking survey detections. HelioLinC, the method that links detections of minor planets in sparse survey data. A version of it, developed by Ari Heinze, runs in Rubin Observatory's solar system pipeline.
- Ephemeris generation. The ephemeris generator of the Sorcha survey simulator, which predicts quickly which objects appear in each survey image (Holman et al. 2025).
- Moons. Discovery or co-discovery of one moon of Jupiter, one of Saturn, seven of Uranus and five of Neptune.