News
School of Physics and Astronomy

RIT has again been recognized as one of the best national universities by U.S. News & World Report, which also cited the university as among the most innovative, with strong undergraduate research opportunities and a highly regarded cooperative learning program.

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.

The National Science Foundation awarded RIT’s College of Science a three-year, $587,000 Building Capacity in STEM Education Research grant. The grant is part of a $1 million collaborative project that aims to extend the impact of the Professional development for Emerging Education Researchers (PEER) field school model to hundreds of emerging education researchers.

NASA mentions Joel Kastner, professor in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy, and alumnus David Principe '10 Ph.D. (astrophysical science and technology) for being part of a team that observed an X-ray flare from a very young star using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

NASA features Joel Kastner, a professor in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy, and astrophysical science and technology Ph.D. students Jesse Bublitz and Paula Moraga on their latest Hubble telescope observations.

Michael Lam, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, explains the Big Bang theory for the "Curious Kids" series published by The Conversation.

The National Science Foundation recently awarded researchers at RIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Louisiana State University, Georgia Tech and West Virginia University grants totaling more than $2.3 million to support further development of the Einstein Toolkit, a community-developed code for simulating the collisions of black holes and neutron stars, as well as supernovas and cosmology.

RIT graduate programs are among the best in the nation, according to the U.S. News annual statistical survey of graduate programs. RIT master’s degree programs in engineering, business and fine arts feature in the U.S. News & World Report 2021 edition of Best Graduate Schools, released in March, including the first specialty ranking of the university’s business analytics master’s program.

Researchers from RIT’s Future Photon Initiative, in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, have produced the Department of Defense’s first-ever fully integrated quantum photonics wafer.

An RIT professor is being honored as one of the first American Astronomical Society Fellows. Joel Kastner, a professor in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy, is part of an initial group of more than 200 Legacy Fellows recently named by the society.

Scientists from RIT have discovered a newborn massive planet closer to Earth than any other of similarly young age found to date. The baby giant planet lies only about 330 light years from our solar system. The discovery, published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, provides researchers an exciting new way to study how gas giants form.

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.