Largest comet ever observed bumps Hale-Bopp from pedestal

February 14, 2022 | LIVEScience, Stephanie Pappas

The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is named after its discoverers, University of Washington postdoctoral scholar Pedro Bernardinelli, and University of Pennsylvania cosmologist Gary Bernstein, who first spotted the comet in the Dark Energy Survey dataset.

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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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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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