Category: Newsletters


Letter From the Director

As we come to a close of a challenging but scientifically exciting academic year, I’m delighted to share in this newsletter some of the work and discoveries made by DiRAC researchers over the past months. We start with a profile…

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Meet DiRAC’s Research Team: Dr. Stephen Portillo

Stephen Portillo’s research focuses on using advances in statistics and machine learning to allow more science to be done with existing astronomical data sets. On the statistics front, he has been developing probabilistic cataloging, a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo…

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Astronomers Document the Rise and Fall of a Rarely Observed Stellar Dance

Over the past year, James Davenport (research assistant professor, and the Associate Director of the DiRAC Institute) and his team at the University of Washington have studied the eclipsing binary system, HS Hydrae. This star is one of rare class…

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THOR: An Algorithm for Cadence-Independent Asteroid Discovery

One of the significant research focuses at the DiRAC Institute has been the development of next generation asteroid and comet discovery algorithms. DiRAC researchers have published a pre-print detailing one such algorithm called “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery” (THOR). Applied to…

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Supernovae Twins Open Up New Possibilities for Precision Cosmology

Type Ia supernovae are some of the most powerful tools for testing different theories of gravity. These supernovae are explosions of massive stars that all look remarkably similar. By measuring how bright a supernova is, we can figure out how…

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Going Dark: The Mystery of Vanishing Stars

Surveys like ZTF and the LSST on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are improving our understanding for nearly every area of modern astronomy. Sometimes, however, these large projects discover something truly unexpected… James Davenport (UW research assistant professor, and the…

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Photometric Redshifts with the LSST II: The Impact of Near-Infrared and Near-Ultraviolet Photometry

The groundbreaking advances in cosmological astrophysics to be made by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) all rely, at least in part, on accurate photometric redshift estimates for billions galaxies in our Universe. These…

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Letter From the Director

Welcome to the DiRAC Institute newsletter, and to the new academic year! Allow me to begin by introducing myself: I’m Mario Juric, Associate Professor of Astronomy at UW and the new Director of DiRAC. My interests span science and technology:…

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Meet DiRAC’s Research Team: Dr. James Davenport

DiRAC is pleased to introduce the new Associate Director of our Institute, Professor James (Jim) Davenport. Davenport received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2015, working on exploring magnetic activity from low-mass stars using NASA’s Kepler mission. He…

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DiRAC & Astronomy on Tap Seattle Present: Astronomy at Home

Once per month, we invite you to join us for an evening with a UW astronomer and participate in talks and live conversations about topics that vary from searching for the most mysterious stars in our Galaxy to the Starlink satellites…

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