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.
An international team of astronomers, including DiRAC research professor James Davenport, reports that superflares pose only a limited danger to exoplanets because the flares tend to originate near the poles of the stars – not the equator where most exoplanets orbit.
Dr. Meredith Rawls, DiRAC Research Scientist, discusses recommendations from the recent “SATCON2” workshop
Working with the United Nations, scientists hope to establish standards for satellite ‘megaconstellations’ and reduce disruption of astronomical observations.
Observations and computer simulations of their orbits and interactions with planets yield insights into the asteroids’ dynamic lives.
Sarah Greenstreet is a senior researcher with the B612 Asteroid Institute in Mill Valley, California, and a research scientist with the Dirac Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In October 2023 a new telescope in Chile called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin a 10-year survey of the entire overhead sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). “Typical telescopes find objects out to 50 or 60 AU,” says LSST team member Mario Jurić of the University of Washington. “With LSST, we can easily go out to 150 AU. We’re going to see things like [the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet] maybe on a monthly basis.”
Dr. James Davenport, research assistant professor of astronomy at the UW and DiRAC associate director explains the current event in the KING 5 news coverage.
Watch the initial KING 5 coverage here and additional follow up via Zoom here.
A team led by Dr. James Davenport, research assistant professor of astronomy at the UW and associate director of the UW’s DIRAC Institute, analyzed more than 125 years of observations of HS Hydra – from astro-photographic plates in the late 1800s to 2019 observations by TESS – and showed how this system has changed dramatically over the course of just a few generations. The two stars began to eclipse in small amounts starting around a century ago, increasing to almost full eclipses by the 1960s. The degree of eclipsing then plummeted over the course of just a half century, and will cease around February 2021.
The sun is the only star in our system. But many of the points of light in our night sky are not as lonely. By some estimates, more than three-quarters of all stars exist as binaries — with one companion — or in even more complex relationships. Stars in close quarters can have dramatic impacts on their neighbors. They can strip material from one another, merge or twist each other’s movements through the cosmos.
And sometimes those changes unfold over the course of a few generations.
That is what a team of astronomers from the University of Washington, Western Washington University and the University of California, Irvine discovered when they analyzed more than 125 years of astronomical observations of a nearby stellar binary called HS Hydrae. This system is what’s known as an eclipsing binary: From Earth, the two stars appear to pass over one another — or eclipse one another — as they orbit a shared center of gravity. The eclipses cause the amount of light emitted by the binary to dim periodically.
Continue reading this article by James Urton in the UW press release here.
Dr. Melissa L. Graham, LSST Research Scientist and DiRAC Fellow, coauthored paper on a large Hubble survey of supernovae “Delayed Circumstellar Interaction for Type Ia SN 2015cp Revealed by an HST Ultraviolet Imaging Survey”.