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.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Mapping the “Cosmic Web”

December 17, 2021 | Research

A tenet of modern cosmology is the existence of the “cosmic web”, a vast filamentary structure formed via the collapse of matter due to gravity. This structure is ubiquitous in cosmological simulations yet challenging to observe due to its diffuse nature. Recently, a new technique was developed which is inspired by the growth and movement […]

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Sifting through the Static

November 22, 2021 | DiRAC News

Trans-Neptunian objects provide a window into the history of the solar system, but they can be challenging to observe due to their distance from the Sun and relatively low brightness. In the recently published paper, Sifting through the Static: Moving Object Detection in Difference Images, DiRAC researchers report the detection of 75 moving objects that […]

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ParSNIP: Using deep learning to identify supernovae and probe dark energy

November 16, 2021 | DiRAC NEWS

DiRAC researchers are heavily involved in building the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new facility that is currently under construction in Chile. This observatory will feature the 8.4 meter Simonyi Survey Telescope and the world’s largest CCD camera which will scan the entire visible sky every three nights. It will discover and observe millions of […]

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Credit: ESA/Hubble