News

The latest in NASA’s upcoming line of powerful in-space telescopes is currently under construction in Rochester. 
Harris Corporation was awarded a nearly $196 million contract by the agency to begin construction on the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST.
In 2016, designs on the WFIRST Telescope were created at Harris. It will explore an area of space 100 times bigger than the Hubble Telescope. Scientists hope the new technology will provide more answers about dark energy and alien life across the universe.

The American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics), a Department of Defense-led public-private partnership headquartered in New York State to advance the nation’s photonics manufacturing capabilities, today announced that three National Science Foundation (NSF) funded grants totaling $1.2 million will enable collaborative photonics-centered R&D with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), University of California-San Diego (UCSD), and University of Delaware (UD), respectively.

The Photonics & Optics Workforce Education Research (POWER) group at RIT College of Science is participating in an online week-long event called STEM for ALL Video Showcase. Check out their video "Workplace Contexts for Math & Communication Preparation" and vote for your favorite.

The Tiangong-1 was the first ever space station launched by the Chinese. They eventually lost connection in 2016. Joe Altieri is part of the astronomy club in Rochester and knows all good things come to an end.

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.