The Blue Binaries: Blue Objects Where There Should Only Be Red Ones
Here I'll be talking about my recently published paper. If you want a copy of any of the articles I talk about, contact me and I will share the PDFs I have the rights to share.
Here I'll be talking about my recently published paper. If you want a copy of any of the articles I talk about, contact me and I will share the PDFs I have the rights to share.
I have something to admit. I have a dirty little secret, and it's time that I air the laundry. Here we go...
I used machine learning. Cough. I know! How could I? How dare I? For years I have been complaining about how machine learning is a lazy-person's route to solving a problem, how could I join the club? Hypocritical? Probably. Worth it? Totally!
This post is about our upcoming Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Kuiper Belt Object, 2015 RR245. I nicknamed this exciting target, Leonardo. I think it's a binary, and not just a single. Here I'll tell you about why that's important, and what observations we should get.
For 6 years now, I've been leading the survey we titled, Colours of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, or Col-OSSOS for short. The basic idea is to gather UV-optical-NIR colours of a wack of Kuiper Belt Objects with a number of constraints that astronomers like (eg. brightness-complete, understood biases, high data quality, etc.).
This past summer my research life has been wholly consumed by a project I have been working on with the New Horizons Team. We are trying to find new objects to observe with the New Horizons Spacecraft.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006 and flew by Pluto, and the small Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. For a sense of what that was like, I made a rendering of the known Kuiper Belt, and the trajectory that the spacecraft took.