Željko Ivezić appointed Director of Rubin Observatory Construction

January 4, 2022 | Rubin Observatory

On January 3, 2022, Željko Ivezić assumed the role of Director of Rubin Observatory Construction, appointed by Matt Mountain, AURA President. Professor Ivezić has been involved with Rubin Observatory/LSST since its inception in the early 2000s, serving for many years as Project Scientist and head of the Project Science Team.

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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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Meet DiRAC’s Postdoctoral Fellow: Pedro Bernardinelli

November 29, 2021 | DiRAC NEWS

Pedro Bernardinelli was born in São Paulo, Brazil and completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of São Paulo. After that, he got his Ph.D from University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the development and application of new techniques for the discovery and characterization of the most distant bodies in our Solar System, trans-Neptunian […]

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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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Meet DiRAC’s Postdoctoral Fellow: Azalee Bostroem

November 20, 2021 | DiRAC NEWS

Bostroem Azalee (pronounced “OZ-a-lee”) is really excited to be in Seattle and joining DiRAC. She comes from a non-traditional career path, majoring in Mathematics at Vassar college where she also was certified to teach middle and high school math. A detour from those plans took her to San Diego State University for a master’s degree […]

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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

Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) Awakens

September 23, 2021 | Rubin Observatory

Great success for Rubin Observatory! On the summit, the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) began moving manually in azimuth and elevation on a thin film of oil in early September—for the first time since factory testing in Spain. You can see a video of this achievement on the Rubin Observatory YouTube channel.

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