June 3, 2024 | AAS Nova
As construction continues on the Vera Rubin Observatory, the skies above its mountaintop home grow more and more crowded following every rocket launch. Astronomers, conscious of the plans for mega-constellations of new satellites in the next few years, are rightfully worried: will these satellites and the tiny bits of debris that come with every deployment […]
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May 31, 2024 |
Earlier this year, DiRAC Fellows Meredith Rawls, Dino Bektešević, and Colin Orion Chandler contributed interviews and satellite-streaked telescope images to an interdisciplinary research and visual art project on the visibility of orbital debris by artist Isabella Ong and curator Seet Yun Teng. The project included an exhibition during April 2024 in Singapore. Isabella originally reached […]
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October 31, 2023 | Salon.com | Elizabeth Hlavinka
October 3, 2023 | UW News | James Urton
A team of scientists has been tracking a bright object in the sky. But it’s not a star. It’s a new type of commercial satellite. Astronomers are trying to understand how its brightness and transmissions will interfere with Earth-based observations of the universe — and what can be done to minimize these effects as more […]
Read More »October 2, 2023 | Space.com
“It is unacceptably bright for many sky observers around the world,” Meredith Rawls (UW, DiRAC) co-author of a paper on the finding and member of the IAU Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference (IAU CPS), told Space.com.
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October 2, 2023 | Newsweek
A new satellite has become one of the brightest objects in the night sky, sparking concerns among scientists for the future of astronomy. Meredith Rawls (UW, DiRAC) is featured.
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September 3, 2023 | JAMIE SWENSON | UW Magazine
In northern Chile in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin gathering images of the night sky. “First light” (as astronomers call the moment a telescopic eye first opens) will inaugurate the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)—the most ambitious and comprehensive optical astronomy survey ever undertaken. The UW was one of four […]
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July 31, 2023 | UW News | James Urton
An asteroid discovery algorithm — designed to uncover near-Earth asteroids for theVera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year survey of the night sky — has identifiedits first “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term for space rocks in Earth’s vicinity thatscientists like to keep an eye on. The roughly 600-foot-long asteroid, designated 2022SF289, was discovered during a test […]
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May 30, 2023 | UW Story | James Urton
How UW astronomers, the world’s largest telescope and a revolutionary survey of space will upend what we thought we knew about the universe. Full article is featured on the UW Homepage here.
Read More » February 1, 2023 | National Geographic, Michael Greshko
“The Zwicky Transient Facility, which found the new green comet, provides a preview of what to expect from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a gigantic facility currently under construction in Chile. Once operational in 2024, it will be the biggest survey telescope ever built, opening up a whole new era of cosmic understanding. “
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