BY JAMIE SWENSON | PHOTO BY BRUNO C. QUINT, RUBIN OBSERVATORY
Earlier this month, a beautiful print issue of the UW Magazine featured DiRAC. Here is the article in the digital format.
Related article:
UW Story, Secrets of the Stars
Thanks to the generous support of the DiRAC Advisory Board, and the local UW Astronomy community, we are proud to introduce our Student Research Prize Winners for Summer 2023! This prize supports undergraduate research in astronomy at the University of Washington, providing students a stipend to focus on their independent research projects under the supervision of UW faculty and scientists. Previous winners of this prize have presented at local and national research conferences, contributed to peer-reviewed publications, and continued on to graduate school. Our summer program has also been featured in the UW College of Arts and Sciences’ Newsletter.
This year we are excited to award 5 summer prizes, including students across a wide range of astronomy and astrophysics research topics:
Thank you to the generous community that supports truly stellar student research at the University of Washington, especially our principle donors David Brooks and Jeff Glickman. You are helping the next generation of scholars to build the most advanced datasets, algorithms, and tools to explore and understand the universe!
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
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!
On May 30th, for a week, a story about anticipation of science from Rubin Observatory was featured on the UW Homepage. Read the story here.
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.
2023 will be filled with opportunities to share with you our research and enthusiasm while the Rubin Observatory construction is marching towards completion.
DiRAC will host various events and lectures throughout the year. We invite you to join UW astronomers in conversations, ask questions and learn about discoveries we anticipate when Rubin begins its observations.
On March 1st, 2023, we are hosting a Planetarium Experience and Institute Tour called “A New Era of Discovery: Mapping the Universe with the Rubin Observatory”. Join us at this special event to meet our team, and learn what is to come from the most powerful sky survey telescope ever built.
On April 6th, 2023, we will again be participating in the Husky Giving Day! In 2022, we piloted DiRAC Research Prize for Undergraduate Research, a paid summer research opportunity for UW undergraduates that will continue in summer 2023. This Prize was made possible by generous funding provided by DiRAC supporters during the DiRAC Husky Giving Day 2022 campaign. This April, we are excited to expand the HGD participation to all of the Astronomy Department, with an eye on adding another program geared towards incoming graduate students. Those two programs will enhance the experience and offer a unique opportunity to our undergraduate and graduate cohorts.
This will be an important year of transition for us: after nearly a decade of building Rubin, we set our sights on delivering some of the first Rubin science from here at UW. We also continue building algorithms and software needed so everyone can utilize this remarkable dataset, democratizing opportunities with astronomical big data + ML. Our wonderful students, postdocs, staff researchers, and engineers make all these advances possible. They are supported from both public and private sources, including tremendous backing by foundations and individuals from Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. As we ramp-up for Rubin, DiRAC research and discoveries will more than ever be enabled by your continued support. Join us and participate in the next wave of astronomical discoveries from UW. Let’s make the Rubin Observatory a defining astronomical instruments of this decade, together.
For more lectures and events please visit our website or sign up for the DiRAC newsletter.
Thank you,
Mario Juric
Director, DiRAC Institute
Professor, Department of Astronomy
On March 1st, DiRAC will host the first of a series of events “A New Era of Discovery: Mapping the Universe with the Rubin Observatory” at the UW Planetarium. It will be an evening of discussion and learning with UW astronomers building the largest sky survey in human history.
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.
The event on March 1st reached its capacity very quickly and is now full. If you’d like to join us for the next one please email us at dirac@uw.edu and we’ll send you an early announcement.
For more upcoming events check out our website’s news and events page.
On April 6th, 2023, join us on Husky Giving Day, an annual philanthropy event at the University of Washington – your support will fuel two student focused programs created by the Astronomy Department and DiRAC!
Program for UW Undergrads: Piloted in 2022, “Undergraduate Summer Research Prize” for UW undergrads will continue in 2023 – please support it and allow more students to participate! This program will award $3500 to UW undergrads working on summer projects with researchers in the DiRAC Institute. Read more about the 2022 cohort here!
Program for UW Grads: A new initiative this year is a “Jumpstart Research” – a program to bring in graduate students over the summer to work with faculty to start their research prior to getting involved in classes.
Our work, from outreach, education, and fundamental research, is made possible in no small part by contributions from supporters like you. Thank you for all of your past support; it has truly made a difference.