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, […]
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 […]
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.
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.
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” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
