A new paper that includes co-authors from the DiRAC Institute, “PhotoD with LSST: Stellar Photometric Distances Out to the Edge of the Galaxy”, will aid in analysis of the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and time (LSST) dataset. Distances to stars are a crucial part of understanding the formation and evolution of the Milky […]
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News
Huge Survey vs. Tiny Space Junk
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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Citizen Scientists Uncover Hidden Secrets of the Solar System: “Active Asteroids” Project Reveals Dozens of Rare Celestial Bodies
March 18, 2024 | Colin Orion Chandler
In a groundbreaking collaboration between scientists and the global community, the “Active Asteroids” Citizen Science project has unveiled a trove of discoveries, shedding light on a poorly understood population of objectspreviously unknown “active minor planets” in our solar system. Launched on August 31, 2021, through a NASA Partner program hosted on the Zooniverse online platform, […]
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New algorithm ensnares its first ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid
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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Big Data in the Night Sky
December 1, 2022 | Nancy Joseph | UW News
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.
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Llamaradas Estelares: Modeling the Morphology of White-Light Flares
May 13, 2022 |
Paper published by Guadalupe Tovar Mendoza and DiRAC’s Associate Director James R. A. Davenport. Stellar variability is a limiting factor for planet detection and characterization, particularly around active M-type stars. Here we revisit one of the most active stars from the Kepler mission. Access the Publication at ADS here.
Read More »Astronomers discover a rare ’black widow’ binary, with the shortest orbit yet
May 4, 2022 | UW News
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” […]
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Space Grant Summer Research – Apply now!
March 17, 2022 | DiRAC NEWS
Washington state’s NASA Space Grant program at the UW invites you, as a faculty member conducting research in a STEM area, to participate our 2022 Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). The application period for students closes on Friday, April 8, 2022. SURP is an excellent way to extend your summer funding through WA Space Grant’s contribution […]
Read More »Simulated SPHEREx spectra of asteroids and their implications for asteroid size and reflectance estimation
January 17, 2022 | DiRAC NEWS
In January 2022, published paper by Zeljko Ivezić, Vedrana Ivezić, Moeyens Joachim… DiRAC members Joachim Moeyens and Zeljko Ivezić, aided by a DiRAC guest researcher Vedrana Ivezić, led a multi-institutional team of scientists who produced and analyzed simulated SPHEREx spectra of asteroids. SPHEREx is a 2-year NASA space mission scheduled for launch in less than […]
Read More »Supernova Siblings and their Parent Galaxies in the ZTF Bright Transient Survey
January 12, 2022 | DiRAC NEWS
Published paper by Melissa Graham Supernovae are the explosions of stars that can be seen across vast distances, appearing as new bright points of light in optical images of the sky, even when the original star was far too faint to be detected. When different types of stars explode (e.g., low-mass and high-mass) they cause […]
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