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. “
Sometime this coming March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth’s low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Agency, or SDA, will bolster the United States’ defense […]
UW doctoral student Anastasios “Andy” Tzanidakis announced the discovery of a rare type of binary star system. Tzanidakis and Dr. James Davenport, a UW research assistant professor of astronomy and associate director of the DiRAC Institute, were investigating why the star Gaia17bpp had gradually brightened over a 2 1/2-year period. In some investigative follow-up work, […]
A few years from now, we just might look back at 2022 as Year One for a new age in aerospace: It was the year when NASA’s next-generation space telescope delivered the goods, when NASA’s moon rocket aced its first flight test, and when an all-electric passenger plane built from the ground up took to […]
In conversation with James Davenport and 2022 DiRAC Research Prize recipients read more about Vera C. Rubin Observatory and important role of the scientists at the UW’s DiRAC Institute.
University of Washington astronomer James Davenport and his colleagues lay out the plan in a research paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print server this month. The idea is also the subject of a talk that Davenport’s giving this week at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in California.
In partnership with the news team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UW News office has posted a story about a rare and mysterious star system discovered by a team of astronomers and reported in a paper published this morning in Nature. The researchers report that the system appears to be a “black widow binary” […]
Astronomy, satellites, and the future of our sky Join us Thursday, May 5th at Noon PDT on Zoom We are witnessing a new era as skies fill with thousands of low-Earth-orbit satellites that reflect sunlight. Observational astronomy at all wavelengths is increasingly affected, and so is the shared human experience of the night sky. For optical ground-based astronomy, the […]