News
Carlos Lousto

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration recently announced the discovery of GW190521, the most massive gravitational wave binary observed to date, and Rochester Institute of Technology scientists played an important role in identifying and analyzing the event.

A team from RIT and the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (IAR) upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15 years in order to study pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The project is outlined in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The Nobel Prize-winning project that hunts for gravitational waves— ripples in space and time—is about to begin the longest and most sensitive observational run to date. And several RIT researchers are preparing to pore over the new data to help uncover some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.

RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and Insituto Argentino de Radioastronomía are beginning new systematic pulsar timing studies. RIT is helping IAR upgrade its two radio telescopes to get them operational again after decades without use.

The American Physical Society is recognizing RIT Professor Carlos Lousto for significant contributions to physics research and the advancement of underrepresented minority scientists.