Welcome to DiRAC’s newsletter!

We are excited to share the latest updates and achievements from our incredible team. Your support makes our work and educational efforts possible, and we are deeply grateful for it.

Mark your calendars for June 12th! Join us for the DiRAC Planetarium Experience, where UW astronomers will reveal their latest discoveries and provide a sneak peek at the possibilities from the Rubin Observatory. After the presentation, enjoy a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of our labs, where the secrets of comet dust are uncovered.

This season has been filled with remarkable discoveries and positive media coverage. We invite you to explore the articles linked here for more details. We hope you find them as inspiring as we do and look forward to seeing you in person at our upcoming DiRAC event.

Thank you,

Mario Juric
Director, DiRAC Institute
Professor, Department of Astronomy

Register here!

Reserve your spot today by using this registration link.

Space is limited for this event.

Refreshments and light appetizers will be available during the event in the auditorium foyer.

Physics/Astronomy Auditorium (PAA), 3910 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105

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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 2025. 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.

We hope you can join us for this enriching experience!

PROGRAM

6:00 PM – 6:30 PM

Welcome & Introduction to DiRAC

Prof. Mario Juric, DiRAC Director

6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Planetarium Experience: First Science with Rubin Observatory

Prof. Andrew Connolly, eScience Director

7:30 PM – 8:00 PM

Conversations with UW Astronomers

Joachim Moeyens, Postdoctoral Fellow at the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington

Ari Heinze, Research Scientist, University of Washington, DiRAC Institute

Colin Orion Chandler, LINCC Frameworks project scientist at the University of Washington and DiRAC Institute

LSST Camera Arrives at Rubin Observatory in Chile, Paving the Way for Cosmic Exploration

This is the last major component of the Rubin Observatory, and it will soon be integrated into the Simonyi Survey Telescope to begin calibration and testing. We at DiRAC, UW Astronomy, and the whole Rubin/LSST community are thrilled to see the hardware finally on site!

This is the last major component of the Rubin Observatory, and it will soon be integrated into the Simonyi Survey Telescope to begin calibration and testing. We at DiRAC, UW Astronomy, and the whole Rubin/LSST community are thrilled to see the hardware finally on site!

As you know, this is the largest digital camera of its kind ever created, and will be in near-constant use for a decade as we search the sky for asteroids, supernovae, and the unknown unknowns! As the first test data starts to arrive, and with Survey operations starting next year, I am so excited to see the discoveries that will rewrite our textbooks. 

Beyond software and science development, we’re busy recruiting and continuing to build the team that will make these groundbreaking discoveries possible at UW.  We are in the midst of grant writing and fundraising to allow us to bring a new cohort of diverse and energetic scientists to Seattle, and I invite you all to continue to be involved in this journey with us. 

Finally, thank you for your support and enthusiasm over the past 6 years. I am always so heartened to see how many people share our vision to understand the Universe through data.

Keep looking up!

Jim Davenport

Associate Director, DiRAC

The Solar System group at the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington has dedicated efforts to advancing asteroid and comet discovery algorithms for large datasets and next generation surveys. Our enduring partnership with the Asteroid Institute has yielded significant progress, resulting in the development of a novel algorithm known as Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR).

This innovative algorithm has been built into the Asteroid Institute’s Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform, running on Google Cloud.

Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation, and Google today announced the most significant results of this partnership to date: identifying 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates.

Congratulations to the entire team!

Featured in New York Times here.

Read more here about the details of their work and the discovery.

Credit: B612 Asteroid Institute / University of Washington DiRAC Institute / OpenSpace Project

Discoveries visualized in the inner Solar System. Main belt asteroid discoveries, shown in green, reside between the orbits of Mars (red) and Jupiter (brownish-gray). The Jupiter Trojans, shown in orange, lead and follow Jupiter at 2 and 10 o’clock. In light blue are Near Earth Objects (NEOs) discoveries.