Insights from MU69’s (Lack of) Craters

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 bombardment of MU69 over the solar system’s life span and calculate the number of craters of different sizes its surface should host.

The authors’ results were intriguing: they found that, despite getting bombarded for 4+ billion years, MU69 should be marred by very few craters. Greenstreet and collaborators estimate that MU69 should have only ~25–50 craters larger than ~200 m in size, which is the smallest size we’re likely be able to see with the full-resolution New Horizons images.

Read full article provided by aasnova.org here.

Collaborative, participant-driven learning works!

Science has become a big-data endeavor. But scientists are not universally adept in “data science” — the computing and statistical skillsets needed to handle, sort, analyze and draw conclusions from big data. The shortage of know-how in data science can hamper research, medicine and even private industry

A new paper led by Daniela Huppenkothen, Associate Director of DiRAC, was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on how we can learn these skills by working collaboratively. With a team of researchers from the University of Washington, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley  she developed an interactive workshop in data science for researchers at multiple stages of their careers. The course format, called “hack week,” blends elements from both traditional lecture-style pedagogy with participant-driven projects. The most recent was a neuroscience-themed event held in July on the UW campus organized by Ariel Rokem, a data scientist with the UW eScience Institute. As the team reports in a their paper published Aug. 20, participants rated the hack weeks as opportunities to learn about new concepts, foster new connections, share data openly, and develop skills and work on problems that will positively affect their day-to-day research lives.

Read more about this in the full UW press release

DiRAC researcher helps investigate the “Most Mysterious Star” from the Kepler Mission

DiRAC Researcher and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, James Davenport, is a coauthor on a recent paper studying “Boyajian’s Star”, aka the Most Mysterious Star in the Universe! KIC 8462852, as the star is officially known, has been observed to undergo dramatic changes in brightness over several days, as well as smaller long-term variations. Both of these forms of variability have been unexplained so far, but this latest paper (including Davenport and UW grad student , Brett Morris) finds that clumpy dust surrounding KIC 8462852 is the most likely explanation.

For more information, see this UW Press Release