Category: 2021 June


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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More