Welcome to the June edition of DiRAC’s newsletter!

As the academic year ends, we have an exciting lineup of updates to share with you, showcasing the achievements and outreach made by our excellent team members.

In March, our researchers had the privilege of sharing their groundbreaking discoveries at the captivating DiRAC Planetarium Event, showcasing our work ranging from astronomical software to mapping where water is in the solar system. Here, we give you a flavor of that work: a captivating research highlight from Bryce Kalmbach, DiRAC research scientist, and Harish Krishnakumar, a high school student from Tesla STEM high school in Redmond, showcasing their work on detecting rare ring galaxies using deep learning.

The anticipation of science from Rubin Observatory has also been a feature story on UW’s main website this past May.

Finally, we extend our heartfelt gratitude for your incredible support on Husky Giving Day. Your support enables us to continue the Summer Research Prizes for UW graduate and undergraduate students, for some of whom this is their first foray into astronomy.

So, grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and join us on this cosmic journey as we delve into the awe-inspiring world of astronomy.

Thank you,

Mario Juric
Director, DiRAC Institute
Professor, Department of Astronomy

On March 1st, 2023 DiRAC hosted the first of a series of events “A New Era of Discovery: Mapping the Universe with the Rubin Observatory” at the UW Planetarium.

The interest in the event exceeded all the expectations. The evening was planned around two planetarium shows and many opportunities to hear the latest updates from scientists, postdoctoral fellows, engineers, and students – all contributing in building the largest sky survey in human history.

UW astronomers informed and engaged guests in various topics from the Rubin Alert Distribution System, Asteroid Dynamics & Impacts to the Big Data & Citizen Science.

In the second part of the evening, DiRAC Director, Prof. Mario Juric, acknowledged one of the major donors and a partner, B612 Foundation. He presented Danica Remy, B612 President, with a small token of gratitude after which a former astronaut and the Asteroid Institute Executive Director, Ed Lu, joined the conversation virtually on Zoom.

DiRAC team is energized by the support of its community and plans to continue the momentum of excitement and curiosity especially as we are nearing the Rubin Observatory’s first light in 2024. We will share the knowledge as we learn it and present opportunities to further engagements and events.

If you would like to stay in touch and learn about the next event, please email us at dirac@uw.edu

“A New Era of Discovery: Mapping the Universe with the Rubin Observatory”

We’re at the brink of a new age of survey-driven discovery in astronomy. Where before we could only study a handful of objects at a time, new detectors, algorithms, and telescopes will soon allow us – and the entire world – to monitor billions.

The flagship of this era will be the Rubin Observatory, set to open in Chile in late 2024. Rubin will continuously gather data for over 20Bn stars, 20Bn galaxies, with billions of asteroid observations. In importance, it is a ground-based peer of the Webb space telescope.

In about a year, DiRAC researchers, students, and citizen scientists will use Rubin to scan the Solar System for hazardous asteroids, discover interstellar comets, and search for new planets in our Solar System. Our codes will map the Milky Way, detect the most energetic explosions in the universe, and help understand Dark Energy. Our students will learn about astronomy by participating in once-in-a-generation wave of discovery.

We’re looking forward to sharing this with the community of enthusiasts, friends, and supporters who make DiRAC possible. 

For more upcoming events check out our website’s news and events page.

On April 6, 2023, DiRAC and UW Astronomy participated in the annual Husky Giving Day event. It was another successful drive for support of our student research programs, with more than 20 individual donors raising a total of over $15,000!

We would like to especially recognize the contributions of members of the DiRAC Advisory Board, particularly David Brooks and Jeff Glickman, who have once again been instrumental at supporting this program. We are currently in the process of awarding these 2023 summer research prizes, and we can’t wait to see what amazing research our students pursue.

Last year we were able to launch successful Summer Research Prize program for undergraduates, which was recently profiled by the UW College of Arts and Sciences Newsletter. This year we were aiming to continue the summer undergraduate prize, as well as kick off a new graduate student support program!

This kind of community-driven support is critical for the programs at DiRAC and UW Astronomy. We have one of the largest undergraduate astronomy programs in the nation, and a world-class cohort of graduate students. If you would like to support the work of these amazing young scientists at any level, please consider making a gift!

In Fall 2021, Harish Krishnakumar, then a junior at Tesla STEM high school in nearby Redmond, Washington, reached out to DiRAC Research Scientist Bryce Kalmbach to be his research mentor for a science fair project detecting and studying the properties of ring galaxies in large extragalactic galaxy surveys. Harish’s work eventually took him to the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair where he won two special awards during the competition.

Recently, Harish and Bryce have been working on a paper summarizing their work that has been submitted to the Astronomical Journal and is available on the ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.11428.pdf.

The work presented in the paper uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify ring galaxies in postage stamp cutouts of galaxies from the Pan-Starrs 1 survey. CNNs are a commonly used deep learning method for classifying objects in large data sets of images. Since ring galaxies are a rare type of galaxy, one of the challenges of this work was finding enough ring galaxies to train the CNNs. For this, the authors turned to the Galaxy Zoo project which used human volunteers over many months to manually classify galaxy morphological types in images. They also used a technique called transfer learning where the neural networks were trained on a larger set of simulated galaxies before parts of the network were retrained on real data. Understanding and applying computational methods such as CNNs will be necessary to detect ring galaxies and other rare galaxy morphologies in the data provided by existing and future surveys like the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). In the end, Harish and Bryce identified 1,151 new ring galaxies after examining over 900,000 galaxies in 10 hours of computation time showcasing a powerful new technique for finding rare morphologies of galaxies in large galaxy surveys.