Welcome back to campus as we embark on a new academic year! I hope you all had a great summer and are ready to dive into your studies and research.

This summer was a vibrant time for the DiRAC community, marked by significant research endeavors. I’m excited to highlight some of this research: Aritra Ghosh’s groundbreaking paper, published in August, explores the fascinating relationship between galaxies in dense environments and the effects of their surroundings. Using machine learning techniques, Aritra analyzed 3 million galaxies observed by the Subaru telescope and conclusively showed that galaxies with many neighbors are larger than their more isolated counterparts — an observational result that contradicts current theoretical expectations. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I highly encourage you to do so!

Additionally, I’m thrilled to welcome our new DiRAC members who have joined us this quarter: Prof. Nora Shipp, Astronomy Assistant Professor and new addition to the DiRAC Faculty; Dr. Peter Ferguson, the 2024 DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow; Dr. Arpit Arora, a postdoc studying galactic dynamics and dark matter; and Michael Tauraso, Software Engineer with the LINCC Frameworks. They bring a diverse set of interests and skills to our team, just in time for LSST. With Nora, Arpit, and Peter joining us, I look forward to DiRAC playing a major role in near-field cosmology in the upcoming years.

As always, we’re striving to make this academic year a productive and inspiring one, filled with learning and discovery. But this year will be special: after nearly two decades of R&D and construction, the Rubin Observatory is entering its commissioning phase in early November and will begin the largest survey of the universe in mid-2025. Expect to read more about it on these pages over the next few months, as the first data starts to arrive.

Welcome to the year of discovery, and follow us as we strive to understand the universe!

Warm regards,

Mario Juric

DiRAC Director

UW Be Boundless Campaign featured Professor Mario Jurić and his undergraduate students, showcasing how to use cutting-edge coding skills to help scientists make the most of discoveries from a revolutionary Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s telescope.

The Rubin Observatory, in northern Chile, will begin a 10-year survey of the night sky in 2025. It is an example of how to harness new technology to drive discoveries and cultivate a new generation of innovators. 

Every night, the Rubin’s Simonyi Survey Telescope will capture millions of changes in stars and other objects. This database of the night sky will require algorithms to sift through the billions of bits of information, so DiRAC scientists and engineers are already crafting the software. And that’s where the future astronomers in Jurić’s class come in.

Read the full article here.

At the University of Washington Peter Ferguson is a DiRAC postdoctoral fellow as well as a fellow in the eScience institute. Previously, he was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was part of the observational cosmology group, and he completed his PhD at Texas A&M University.

Peter Ferguson is interested in learning about the nature of dark matter and galaxy formation using wide-field astronomical surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

In particular, he works on finding and characterizing stellar streams and dwarf galaxies in the local universe and enabling this science by making infrastructure level contributions to cosmological surveys. These contributions range from instrumentation and calibration to science validation and software development.

In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the team, which used a machine-learning algorithm to analyze millions of galaxies, reports that galaxies found in denser regions of the universe are as much as 25% larger than isolated galaxies. The findings resolve a long-standing debate among astrophysicists over the relationship between a galaxy’s size and its environment, but also raise new questions about how galaxies form and evolve over billions of years.

Dr. Aritra Ghosh, a UW postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and an LSST-DA Catalyst Fellow with the UW’s DiRAC Institute, led the team behind this discovery, which includes researchers at Yale, the Leibniz Institute and Waseda University. Dr. Andrew Connolly, a UW professor of astronomy, is co-author on the study.

Here is a link to the full story written by James Urton for the UW News.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/08/14/galaxy-size/

At the end of August, we were treated to wrap-up presentations by the four Summer Research Prize recipients. Now in its third year, the Summer Research Prize is awarded to support new and ongoing undergraduate research projects, and help students work closely with their mentors at the University of Washington. This prize is made possible through the generous support of our community, faculty, and friends, and has been featured in the UW College of Arts and Sciences’ Newsletter.

Our 2024 prize winners included:

• Sophia Watts (Advisors Yakov Faerman, Matt McQuinn) Investigating intergalactic filaments and sheets
• Maggie Vickers (Advisor: Bruce Balick) Examining Density Tracers in Low-Ionization structures in Planetary Nebula
• Giovanni Gollotti (Advisors: Andy Tzanidakis, Tobin Wainer) A New Candidate Triplet Binary System in the Beta-Pic Moving Group: HIP 23309
• Felix Knowlton (Advisors: Jake Kurlander, Mario Jurić) High-Fidelity HelioLinC Stress-Testing for LSST Preparedness

I find it especially exciting how these projects span almost the entire range of astronomy and astrophysics work happening at UW, from simulations of baby galaxies from Sophia, to the remnants dying stars from Maggie – from current mysteries of an unusual binary star system from Giovanni, to developing the code to rapidly find the most unusual asteroids in future surveys from Felix. UW Astronomy and DiRAC are host to a wide range of discovery and innovation, and each year the Summer Research Prize shows just a tiny piece of this great work.

Thank you to the generous community that enables truly stellar student research at the University of Washington, especially our principal donor again this year, DiRAC Advisory Board member David Brooks. You are helping the next generation of scholars to build the most advanced datasets, algorithms, and tools to explore and understand the universe!

I invite you all to join us again next year for more student-driven discovery!

-James Davenport, Associate Director of DiRAC

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.