University of Washington

I’m delighted to share in this newsletter some of the DiRAC team's work and discoveries.

JUNE 2021

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

We start with a profile of Dr. Stephen Portillo, a DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow whose work at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and astronomy is making it possible for us to precisely measure even the densest areas of our Galaxy.

Then read about how Dr. Kyle Boone, a DiRAC and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, uses “supernova twins” for precision cosmology — precise measurements of distances in the universe. Find out how Joachim Moeyens, one of our graduate students, is advancing the state-of-the-art in discovery of dwarf planets, comets, and asteroids in the Solar System with novel object discovery algorithms. And finally, stay for an interview with DiRAC’s associate director Prof. Jim Davenport about the searches for intelligent life in the universe, and tale of a rare eclipsing binary system, RR Hydrae.

Read Director's full letter.

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 method that improves...

DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow Stephen Portillo

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 of...

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 observations from...

Supernovae Twins Open Up New Possibilities

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 far away it is. Type Ia supernovae were used to make the initial discovery of...

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...

Your gifts make a difference...

Strengthen our department through the DiRAC Program Fund which is perhaps the most important resource for the research team to continue the work. Gifts to this fund provide unrestricted support that can be directed where it is needed most.

We are grateful to our supporters!