Dr. Stephen Portillo, DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow, coauthored paper “Photometric Biases in Modern Surveys” published in March 2020. Many surveys use maximum-likelihood (ML) methods to fit models when extracting photometry from images. We show that these ML estimators systematically overestimate the flux as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio and the number of model parameters involved in the […]

Paper published by DiRAC Researcher, Dr. Sarah Greenstreet. Dr. Greenstreet is a joint postdoctoral fellow with the Asteroid Institute, a program of B612, and the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the study of orbital dynamics and impacts of small bodies in the Solar System.

Months ago, a team of scientists led by Sarah Greenstreet (B612 Asteroid Institute and University of Washington) conducted a study in which they made predictions for the crater count they expected to find on MU69’s surface. Greenstreet and collaborators used observations of Pluto and Charon’s surfaces and models of known Kuiper-belt populations to explore the […]

DiRAC Researcher, Gwendolyn Eadie, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. In a series of three papers, Eadie et al. developed a hierarchical Bayesian method to estimate the Milky Way Galaxy’s mass given a physical model for the potential, a measurement model, and kinematic data of test particles such as globular clusters (GCs) or halo […]