Issuu

Annual Report

2023

Annual Report 2023 About Us | Who We Are

Message from the Director

Impact Dashboard

Highlights

Building the Rubin Observatory Rubin Imaging Pipeline: First Test LINCC Framework Is Go! First Results from DEEP

08 09 10 11

People Student Summer Prize Program Congratulations: Prizes and Awards New Faculty: Sarah Greenstreet New Postdoctoral Fellow: Artira Ghosh In Depth A Stellar Photobomb! UW Story: Secrets of the Stars BlueWalker New algorithm ensnares its ﬁrst potentially hazardous asteroid Our Community Advisory Board: Chair's Message Visiting the Rubin Observatory DiRAC Events in 2024 Supporting the Next Generation Thank You to Our Partners and Supporters

12 13 14 15 16 17 19 23 25

28 29 31 32 33 34

Annual

Report

002

About Us | Who We Are VISION A universe understood through data-intensive discovery.

MISSON To build the world's most advanced datasets, algorithms, and tools and use them to explore and understand the universe.

The DiRAC Institute is a world leading, interdisciplinary research center that addresses fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our universe. Our research brings together scientists across many disciplines on a mission to understand the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the emergence of structure within the universe, the formation of galaxies, the birth and evolution of black holes, the transformations of stars, and the origins of the planets. Visit our website to learn more https://dirac.astro.washington.edu/ 003

Message from the Director As the year comes to a close, it is a pleasure to write to you today as the Director of the DiRAC Institute, University of Washington’s hub for research in data-intensive astrophysics and cosmology, and reﬂect back on the work behind us. Founded just six years ago, DiRAC has grown into a truly world-class research institute. Our members have co-authored over 500 papers garnering more than 13,000 citations, developed novel algorithms and software powering the next generation of astronomical experiments, while at the same time educating and spreading this know-how onto the next generation of students and the public at large. Throughout 2023 we’ve continued to push towards the vision of a Universe understood through data-intensive discovery. Our team devised and leveraged the immense power of novel algorithms, large datasets, coupled with cloud and high-performance computing, to tackle some of the most pressing scientiﬁc challenges of our time.

Mario Jurić Director, DiRAC Institute Professor, Department of Astronomy

We’ve explored the Solar System: from discovering hundreds of distant small bodies in its farthest reaches, to finding an asteroid potentially hazardous to Earth that has eluded detection so far. Our students sifted through time-domain data to discover rare stars, and identify strange X-ray sources. Our team looked at the impact of satellite constellations on Earth-based observing, analyzing their effect and ways to enable the co-existence of astronomy and technological progress in an increasingly connected world. And we continue to build and prepare for the science of the once-in-a-generation Rubin Observatory: our teams deployed the critical real-time data analysis pipelines, as well as the first version of our novel big data analysis software and formats. This is just a sample of the achievements you will read about here, and a testament to the dedication and expertise of our students, postdocs, researchers, faculty, and staff. Ultimately, what we can do and contribute always comes down to people, and I am incredibly proud of the team we’ve built at DiRAC. This year we have welcomed new members, including Dr. Aritra Ghosh (the 2023 LINCC Catalyst Fellow), Dr. Sarah Greenstreet (now an affiliate faculty who has joined our Leadership team), and numerous undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects with our groups. 004

Message from the Director An integral and critical part of our success is the support we receive by our wonderful volunteers and community members. For the second year in a row, we’ve been able to award Summer Research Prizes, this time to ﬁve undergraduate students. This program is the result of partnerships with the DiRAC Advisory Board and our community of supporters through the Husky Giving Day program. And through an incredibly generous donation from Lloyd and Janet Frink, we are able to continue the DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellowship program into 2024. I wish to thank all our supporters: our work wouldn’t have been possible without you – these accomplishments are yours as much as ours!

Looking ahead, 2024 promises to be an incredibly exciting year. After over two decades in research, development, and construction, we expect to obtain first observations and start commissioning the Rubin Observatory. With the data from Rubin, and by working together, we can make significant progress in addressing some of the most pressing scientific challenges of our time and unlocking new avenues for understanding the universe. So join us in reading what is just a small sample of the work and excitement of the past year. Please don't hesitate to visit our website or contact us directly to learn more about the DiRAC Institute, how you can get involved, and support this wonderful research. Sincerely, Prof. Mario Juric Director, DiRAC Institute .

Annual Report

005

DiRAC

Impact Dashboard

2023 by the Numbers

+90 Papers published in 2023

+2100 GB of compressed ZTF alerts

Graduate Students

Postdocs

Software Engineers

Research Scientists

Faculty

+5000 Research citations

New Summer Research Prize Scolars

+110 Asteroids & TNOs discovered

05 09

Advisory Board Members

1M ZTF alerts per night

archived

+500 TB of imaging processed with LSST pipelines

+100 users of LINCC Jupyter Hub remote analysis experimental platform

Highlights

Building the Rubin Observatory Rubin Imaging Pipeline: First Test LINCC Framework Is Go! First Results from DEEP Student Summer Prize Program Congratulations: Prizes and Awards New Faculty: Sarah Greenstreet New Postdoctoral Fellow: Artira Ghosh

Rubin Observatory Construction is Nearing Its Completion

The Rubin Observatory NSF's new flagship ground-based facility has entered its integration and commissioning phase. The team is eagerly awaiting the shipment of its last major piece of equipment, the LSST Camera, from SLAC to Chile in March 2024. The Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) was delivered by the Spanish vendor earlier this year and is currently undergoing dynamic testing with surrogate mirrors and the Commissioning Camera mounted on it. During the first half of 2024, the optics (M1/M3 and M2 mirrors) will be integrated with the TMA and the completed telescope will be ready for a camera and on-sky observations in July 2024. At the time of this writing, it is likely that the Commissioning Camera (with 9 sensors, compared to the LSST Camera's 189 science sensors) will be initially used to take on-sky data for two months, followed by "system first light" with the LSST Camera in early 2025. In parallel with hardware integration and commissioning, software pipelines are being completed and tested using extant and Rubin Auxiliary Telescope data. The Rubin group at DiRAC is leading the Alert Pipeline testing and commissioning. As Rubin Observatory Construction is nearing its completion, the Rubin Operations Team is preparing for the start of LSST and relentless

Prof. Željko Ivezić Rubin Observatory, Director Professor, Department of Astronomy

10 years of sky surveying, while several thousand members of eight Rubin Science Collaborations are ﬁnalizing their preparations and tools for data analysis. DiRAC's Solar System group has played a major role in these preparations by designing and computing simulated catalog of LSST Solar System object observations. These catalogs have been made available to the Solar System community by the Rubin Operations team as part of the so-called Data Preview 0 (Data Previews 1 and 2 will include real data collected during commissioning phase). The countdown for science is on: Rubin Observatory Construction will be completed in 2025, with LSST data taking starting in late 2025. 008

Real-time processing of Rubin images gets a head start A deﬁning feature of the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is the promise to process images quickly and accurately and deliver alerts to the astronomical community of all transient and variable objects observed in real time.

This year, DiRAC Leadership members Ian Sullivan and Eric Bellm led the Prompt Processing team to successfully design and build the software infrastructure to run the LSST Alert Production pipeline in production, with scientiﬁc quality results from all 3200 megapixels of the camera streaming to the alert brokers a mere minute after the shutter closes on the mountain. The team is actively exercising the capabilities of Prompt Processing with nightly live runs from the Auxiliary Telescope using a single LSST CCD at the Rubin Observatory site, and with replayed full focal plane images from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam. With a great team in place and live infrastructure that is being exercised daily, we are ready in advance for LSST and its record-setting camera.

Ian Sullivan Senior Research Scientist Rubin Alert Production | DiRAC Institute Anna Johnson

CEO and Founder, Visions

Eric Bellm Research Associate Professor University of Washington Rubin Alert Production | DiRAC Institute

Annual Report

009

LINCC Framework is go! The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is the ﬂagship ground-based astronomical survey of the 2020s. It will generate the deepest-ever, multi-color, 10-year-long movie of the southern sky, detecting 30 billion stars and galaxies and amassing 100 PB of imaging and catalog data. The scientiﬁc reach of the LSST will be extraordinary, addressing questions such as: how did the Solar System form; what governs the birth and death of stars; how does dark matter sculpt the shape of our Galaxy; will an asteroid devastate the Earth in the next century; what is the nature of the dark energy that drives the expansion of our Universe? The vision for LINCC Frameworks, a collaboration between the University of Washington (UW), Carnegie Mellon University, and the LSST Discovery Alliance is to enable astronomical discoveries through the development of software frameworks that can scale to the volume and complexity of the LSST data. LINCC Frameworks at UW is part of our DiRAC Institute and comprises software engineers who came to UW from industry and postdocs, research scientists and graduate students at UW. Together they are building the key algorithms and code needed to extract knowledge from the data, frameworks to enable petabyte-scale analyses, mechanisms to search for one-in-a-million events in continuous streams of data.

KBMOD (Kernel Based Moving Object Detection) uses GPUs to search through billions of potential trajectories for asteroids in the outer solar system to ﬁnd asteroids that are too faint to see in a single image

Prof. Andrew Connolly DiRAC Founding Director eScience Institute Director

This was the first year the full team was in place and there were many highlights with the UW teaming working on discovering asteroids in the outer Solar System using KBMOD and developing new ways to search for unusual events in time series data with TAPE. One on the most fun was the creation of an incubator program where astronomers from across the world can work with our engineering team to improve their code. The first incubator at UW was a collaboration with a team from Queen’s University Belfast on a solar system simulator (Sorcha) that can model what LSST might discover when it starts operations. The LINCC Frameworks team led a comprehensive improvement of the Sorcha’s tooling to include modern industry standards, unit testing, benchmarking, and continuous integration as well as making it easily installable. The team contributed multiple efficiency improvements that resulted in a >40x speedup in the code. Where the previous full run of the system took 3 weeks on a large compute cluster with 1000 cores, the code now takes under a day on 32 cores. This substantively changes how the code can be used, opening up options for much more exploratory usage.

Annual Report

010

First Results from DEEP Deep Ecliptic Exploration Project The DEEP Collaboration (Northern Arizona University, University of Michigan, UW,+others) have been working for nearly four years now on the deepest and largest ground based survey of the outer Solar System. (50 nights on the Blanco 4m telescope). Discoveries of >1000 new KBOs, constraints on their sizes. In June, we submitted a series of 6 papers with ﬁrst results, two of which are led by DiRAC members (Bernardinelli et al., Smotherman et al.) As a part of these 6 papers, the UW team recovered 110 trans-Neptunian objects - 105 being discoveries, with diameters ranging from 40 to 240 kilometers. Their orbits are shown in the image below.

Annual Report

Pedro Bernardinelli DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow

011

Student Summer Research Prize Prof. James Davenport, DiRAC Associate Director with the Summer Research Prize recepients and a long time supporter David Brooks

Now in its second year, the UW Astronomy Department’s Summer Research Prize continues to support student research across all areas of astronomy. This year we were able to award ﬁve Prizes – the most yet! – to support research from topics ranging from discovering nearby asteroids to measuring the expansion of the Universe. We are so proud of many student researchers at UW, and the DiRAC team leading the Summer Research Prize (Davenport, Connolly, and Horvat) look forward to seeing it continue to grow. This program is the result of partnerships with the DiRAC Advisory Board and our community of supporters through the Husky Giving Day program. We want to especially thank David Brooks and Jeﬀ Glickman for their foundational support of this program!

https://dirac.astro.washington.edu/introducing-the-2023-summer-student-research-prize-winners/

Annual Report

012

Congratulations for Awards and Recognition to Joachim and Lupita Student Presentation Award for Astronomy & Astrophysics

International Astronomical Union (IAU) PhD Thesis Award

The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) recognized students from historically excluded communities for their research and presentation skills at the National Diversity in STEM Conference, held in Portland in October 2023. Guadalupe (Lupita) Tovar Mendoza received the Student Presentation Award for Astronomy & Astrophysics, for her dissertation work focusing on stellar ﬂare statistics and exoplanet detection. Lupita is an expert in ﬂare behavior in surveys such as TESS and Gaia, and is working with Prof. Davenport of DiRAC.

Congratulation to Joachim Moeyens, on the International Astronomical Union (IAU) PhD Award. Joachim was recognized in May 2023 by Division B - Facilities, Instrumentation, and Data Science for the best Ph.D. dissertation completed in the 2022 calendar year. His thesis work was advised by Prof. Jurić of DiRAC, and supported by B612 Foundation's Graduate Student fellowship.

Annual Report

013

Welcoming New Affiliate Faculty: Sarah Greenstreet Sarah Greenstreet first joined the DiRAC Institute in January 2018 as a postdoctoral fellow working on the B612 Asteroid Institute’s ADAM project. After 6 years as a postdoc and then research scientist with DiRAC, she recently accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Astronomer at the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in Tucson, where she now works remotely from Seattle. In addition, Greenstreet was recently appointed as an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Astronomy at UW, joining the DiRAC Leadership Team, to continue supervising research with UW students. Prof. Greenstreet’s research program largely focuses on asteroid orbital dynamics to learn how asteroid orbits change over time as the planets push them around the Solar System. In particular, she specializes in how asteroids can get onto rare and unusual orbits, studying the objects that make us ask "How did that get there?". This includes asteroids that migrate from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to orbits at least 4x closer to the Sun inside the orbit of Venus. She also discovered a mechanism that can push asteroids onto orbits that move backwards around the Sun, contrary to the direction nearly everything in the Solar System moves. She also studies asteroid impacts and planetary defense. Prof. Greenstreet has also heavily collaborated with the New Horizons science team on interpreting the science results from the spacecraft's flyby of the Pluto system in 2015. The majority of her recent work has been preparing for the revolutionizing, petabyte-scale deluge of data the Rubin Observatory will produce over its upcoming 10-year survey. This includes a project in which Greenstreet and colleagues used large-scale computer simulations of the 12,000+ known asteroids near Jupiter to study their orbital behavior over tens of thousands of years. They looked for evidence that the asteroids may be temporarily captured onto orbits very similar to Jupiter’s orbit. Their successful search identified, for the first time, 27 asteroids that act as these “companions” of Jupiter for thousands to millions of years. Along with DiRAC students, she is building an automated pipeline that will analyze the forthcoming Rubin data to identify more temporary Jupiter companions, of which they expect to find many in the coming years. In addition to her Rubin-related research, Greenstreet leads the world-wide near-Earth objects and interstellar objects working group within Rubin’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Solar System Science Collaboration. She is also a member of Rubin’s Community Science Team at NOIRLab.

Annual Report

014

Welcome Aritra Ghosh Aritra Ghosh, an LSST-DA Catalyst Fellow and a UW Data-Science Fellow, joined our team this October, following the completion of his Ph.D. at Yale University. Aritra specializes in leveraging cutting-edge machine-learning techniques in conjunction with large astronomical surveys to study the formation & evolution of galaxies. In recent years, Aritra has spearheaded the development of multiple deep-learning frameworks designed to characterize the shape, size, and structure of galaxies. He has focused on rigorous stress-testing of these frameworks, and on enabling them to predict robust uncertainties. In a recent publication, Aritra used his framework called GaMPEN to predict the structural parameters and associated uncertainties for 8 million galaxies in the Hyper-Suprime Cam Wide Survey. This catalog is 10 times larger, probes 4 magnitudes deeper, and has 60% more accurate uncertainties compared to previous similar catalogs. This catalog will continue to be an excellent resource for comprehensive studies of galaxy morphology for years to come. Aritra is now using this catalog to derive new insights into how the growth of galaxies over cosmic time is aﬀected by their environmental density. Aritra’s work at DiRAC will involve further improvement of the above-mentioned frameworks and the development of new ones that can determine other physical properties of galaxies — all with a focus on extracting new insights from the ﬁrst wave of data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Aritra will also be leading a new initiative over the next year to develop a comprehensive framework for the detection and follow-up of interesting extragalactic anomalies in LSST data.

An overview of how the Galaxy Morpohlogy Posterior Estimation Network (GaMPEN) takes in input images, crops them appropriately and then predicts posterior distributions of structural parameters.

Annual Report

015

In Depth

The seven-year photobomb: Distant star’s dimming was likely a ‘dusty’ companion getting in the way, astronomers say UW Story: Secrets of the Stars Blue Walker : Group seeks to understand how a new type of satellite will impact Earth-based astronomy New algorithm ensnares its ﬁrst potentially hazardous asteroid

The seven-year photobomb: Distant star’s dimming was likely a ‘dusty’ companion ge�ing in the way, astronomers say

DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY

SECRETS OF THE STARS How UW astronomers, the world’s largest survey telescope and a revolutionary new view of space will upend what we thought we knew about the universe. Beneath breathtakingly crisp views of the night sky, atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the foothills of the Andes in northern Chile, is a nearly ﬁnished construction project that will transform how we look at the universe. Though it resembles a postmodern oﬃce building, its domed tower is the telltale sign of an astronomical observatory.

Next year, when its upward-turned eye opens to the heavens, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will form the beating heart of a revolution that is sweeping astronomy. It will impact nearly every mission, every question and every research project exploring what is “out there” beyond Earth. It could even change how we view our place within the cosmos. Assuming, of course, astronomers can navigate their way through the unprecedented amount of data the Rubin Observatory will gather starting in 2025 — a challenge that the UW is rising to meet. The Rubin Observatory, which features a 27-foot mirror and the largest digital camera ever constructed, will unleash a deluge of information about our night sky as part of the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The University of Washington was a founding member of the LSST mission, which is no ordinary stargazing venture.

Thanks to the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, the LSST will be the most ambitious mission ever to capture and understand the countless cosmic events that shape and reshape our universe — effectively rewriting the astronomy books we use today. “A generation ago, a telescope might watch just a thousand stars in a single observation run,” says James Davenport, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts & Sciences. “The Rubin Observatory will observe several billion objects in the sky, giving us thousands of times more data than other telescopes could capture — and that’s just in a single night.” But data on its own can’t drive discovery. The astronomers need tools — algorithms, software and expertise — to sort through Rubin’s bounty. “It’s like someone delivering a silo of grain and saying, ‘Here, I’ve solved your hunger problem.’ You actually haven’t yet — not until we have the means to process that grain and bake loaves,” says Mario Jurić, a UW astronomy professor. “We’ll get silos of grain each night from the Rubin Observatory, and the field of astronomy needs to figure out how to transform that into bread.” This is where DiRAC — the UW’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics & Cosmology — comes in. Launched in 2017 with lead funding from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, DiRAC is ready to help us make sense of the discoveries of Rubin and the new generation of telescopes.

019

DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY

FEEDING ASTRONOMY’S HUNGER Jurić and Davenport are the director and associate director (respectively) of DiRAC, a collaborative community of scientists, engineers and students who are crafting software that can comb through those mountains of astronomical data to help scientists understand the events and changes unfolding continuously above our heads. Each night, the Rubin’s camera is expected to capture millions of changes in stars and other objects — too many to sort through in a lifetime.

The Rubin Observatory will impact nearly every mission, every question and every research project exploring what is “out there” beyond Earth. It could even change how we view our place within the cosmos.

The astronomical events the LSST will pick up are diverse. Some will be subtle, like a dim asteroid in a frigid orbit around the sun. Others will be dramatic, like a massive star at the end of its life immolating brilliantly as a supernova. The tools DiRAC is developing for the Rubin project are equally diverse. Daily automated alerts, for example, will help scientists worldwide identify events that require immediate action — such as an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Other tools will enable longer-term studies, like tracking the behavior of a speciﬁc set of stars over time in our Milky Way galaxy. “These are important tools to help democratize science and make it accessible,” says Jurić. “Most astronomers

Data on its own can’t drive discovery. Astronomers need tools — algorithms, software and expertise — to sort through Rubin’s bounty. “It’s like someone delivering a silo of grain and saying, ‘Here, I’ve solved your hunger problem.’ You actually haven’t yet — not until we have the means to process that grain and bake loaves,” says Mario Jurić, UW astronomy professor and director of DiRAC. “We’ll get silos of grain each night from the Rubin Observatory, and the ﬁeld of astronomy needs to ﬁgure out how to transform that into bread.”

are not experts in writing algorithms or software to sort through large datasets. The tools we’re developing will do those jobs for them, so users can pull out the data that interests them and keep the discovery pipeline going.” Beyond these tool-building goals, DiRAC scientists are looking forward to applying LSST data to a host of scientiﬁc mysteries.

Photo by Christopher Michel

DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY

FINDING THE STRANGE AND POWERFUL Many of us remember making solar-system mobiles in school, with eight (or nine, depending on our age) painted balls representing the planets — but it turns out the solar system is far more crowded than we were taught. After “first light” — when Rubin becomes operational in early 2025 — DiRAC scientists will use the data to understand our astronomical history, observe the present and predict the future, tracking and studying everything from protecting ourselves from near-Earth asteroids to the possibility of finding a Planet Nine lurking in the frozen reaches beyond our star. DiRAC researcher Sarah Greenstreet works alongside teams that are creating an automated alert system for objects in motion that could impact the Earth. She notes that asteroids and other small bodies around the sun are also windows to the past — “which can help us understand how they have moved through the solar system throughout its history.” Other DiRAC scientists will have their gazes fixed on stars themselves. Contemporary research is challenging long-prevailing theories about how these burning furnaces form, live and die. In his own research, Davenport — who notes that he “likes weird stars” — has catalogued unexpected stellar pairings, such

as a large puffy star (one that’s expanding in its twilight years) orbited by a small companion star encased in cosmic dust, or two stars whose dance around each other is twisted and turned by an unseen third companion. With the LSST watching hundreds of Sarah Greenstreet millions of stars each night, scientists like Davenport expect to find more of these strange systems and learn why some stars are paired up while others, like our calm sun, are not. “A bunch of stars out there show unusual and unexpected behavior,” says Davenport. “Is it possible that they aren’t unusual at all, but are actually very common? If so, we’ll have to go back to the theories of star formation and galaxy formation and redefine what’s ‘unusual.’” Still other DiRAC researchers have their eyes on even bigger prizes, including the powerful events — like black hole or neutron star mergers — that generate gravitational waves. The LSST mission will provide data about the highly energetic events that generate these waves, giving scientists valuable insight never before available.

DiRAC researcher Sarah Greenstreet is working on an automated alert system for objects in motion that could impact the Earth. She notes that asteroids are also windows to the past — “which can help us understand how they have moved through the solar system throughout its history.”

DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY

LOOKING FOR THE UNEXPECTED Those are just a few of the discoveries scientists expect to ﬁnd. But buried within the massive datasets from LSST and the Rubin Observatory will doubtless be evidence of events, objects and phenomena that may shock and confound scientists.

WHAT COULD WE DISCOVER? A few of the astronomical mysteries the Rubin Observatory is expected to shed light on:

Those “anticipated unknowns,” pulled from the sky above the arid Andes and then examined at a rain-washed campus half a world away, are what most excite astronomers like Davenport. “The lasting legacy of the LSST will be in the surprises buried in the datasets that we’re helping to uncover,” he says with anticipation. “Students today will be working with these data for the rest of their careers — and that is precisely how astronomy should work.” Author: James Urton

More about UW scientists’ work with DiRAC and the Rubin Observatory

Light from black hole and neutron star mergers, which generate gravitational waves detected halfway across the visible universe Hundreds of supernovae each night (10–100 times more than ever seen) “Stars behaving strangely” — fading or brightening suddenly due to ﬂare activity or interactions with a nearby star

Planet Nine, if it’s out there!