Siegfried Eggl, a professor of aerospace engineering and an affiliate of the department of astronomy and his graduate student Samuel Cornwall are on the team of scientists that discovered a dwarf planet from some of the first images collected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Eggl is an aerospace engineering professor in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Astronomy.
Eggl said his team’s role was to optimize discovery rates for asteroids and to confirm that the astrometric measurements of solar system objects observed by Rubin Observatory including that of the new object were correct and unbiased.
“When a new object is identified in the Solar System, we need to verify its exact location; the astrometry needs to be accurate,” he said. “The further out it is in the solar system, the more difficult this becomes, because any error or uncertainty in these observations scales with the distance to the object.”