News

Researchers at RIT have found a more efficient fabricating process to produce semiconductors used in today's electronic devices. They also confirmed that materials other than silicon can be used successfully in the development process that could increase performance of electronic devices. 

In about a year from now, thousands of miles out in space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will unfurl its mirrors and begin delivering data about the very birth of the universe. In our corner of the planet, RIT professors and students will be interpreting that information to resolve long-held questions about how it all began.

The Dark Matter Summer School Registration is now open! The Summer School program will take place July 16-20 2018. One of the featured lecturers will be Dr. Mike Zemcov, of RIT's Future Photon Initiative and Center for Detectors.

RIT researchers are designing star-tracking tools for the second Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment, or CIBER-2, an observational cosmology project led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.

The latest Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards poster competition occurred 9-11 January during the 231st AAS meeting near Washington, DC. A hundred undergraduates and 70 graduate students completed their entries into the competition — all of them junior (or very newly associate or full) members of the Society (a requirement to participate).

There may be more big stars out there than we thought. A study of part of the Large Magellanic Cloud found significantly more huge stars than we would expect to see, which could mean that there are more supernovae and black holes too.

Most objects in the center of the Milky Way are so highly obscured from our view by intervening dust that, at wavelengths visible to the naked eye, only about one photon out of every trillion emitted by them toward the Earth actually reaches our planet. 

A SWARM of baby stars live just a fraction of a light year from our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. But no one can explain how they ended up so close in their short lifetimes.
Stars form by coalescing out of a cloud of dust and gas. But this can’t happen close to the Milky Way’s centre as the gravity from the supermassive black hole rips apart nearby clouds before any stars can grow.

NASA has recently chosen six proposed astrophysics mission for concept studies. Among them is the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx, which aims to unlock the mysteries of the universe by performing the first all-sky spectral survey.

Harnessing light through photonics to power today’s electronic devices is an industry in the making. Rochester became the focal point of that emerging industry when it was awarded a multimillion dollar federal investment in July 2015 to create a national photonics center, AIM—the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics— part of the federal government’s Manufacturing USA institutes.

Prior to cruising well beyond Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft used an onboard imaging telescope to make the best-ever observations of the universe’s cosmic optical background (COB). That is, the sum of the universe’s emitted optical light from beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced today the expansion of Precision Optical Transceivers, a system engineering company focused on optical transport technology, into Eastman Business Park in Rochester.  "Precision’s Rochester expansion only adds to the region’s momentum as a destination for high tech business and innovation," Governor Cuomo said. "This great news is one more reason why the Finger Lakes is moving forward."