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School of Physics and Astronomy

The fellowship program provides opportunities to outstanding scientists and engineers to learn first-hand about policymaking and contribute their knowledge and analytical skills in the policy realm. Brennan Ireland ’18 Ph.D. (astrophysical sciences and technology) will use his analytical skills to quantitatively evaluate countries to get a better picture of what their futures look like.

Sky & Telescope reports that a recent study by RIT suggests the dwarf galaxy Antlia 2 had a long-ago run-in with our galaxy, rippling and warping its disk. But not everyone agrees with that scenario.

Discover magazine features Sukanya Chakrabarti, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and her research on the recently-discovered dwarf galaxy Antlia 2.

Though direct observational evidence of Antlia 2 was not obtained until last year, one scientist has had a decade-long hunch that it was there. Sukanya Chakrabarti, an astrophysicist at RIT predicted in 2009 that an object packed with dark matter was causing tidal effects at the edge of the Milky Way.

Sci-News features new research, led by RIT, that shows the collision of the recently-discovered dwarf galaxy Antlia 2 with the Milky Way Galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago is responsible for ripples in the Milky Way’s outer gas disk.

Antlia 2, the "ghost of a galaxy" orbiting the Milky Way, is a dark horse in more ways than one. Not only is it so faint it was only just discovered last year, it may now be responsible for curious ripples in the hydrogen gas that makes up the Milky Way's outer disc.

The newly-discovered dark dwarf galaxy Antlia 2’s collision with the Milky Way may be responsible for our galaxy’s characteristic ripples in its outer disc, according to a study led by Assistant Professor Sukanya Chakrabarti. The Antlia 2 dwarf galaxy was discovered from the second data release of the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which aims to chart a three-dimensional map of our galaxy.

Assistant Professor Michael Zemcov interviewed by North Shore News for his part in contributing to NASA’s new mission to explore the origins of the universe by performing the first near-infrared all-sky spectral survey. 

Guest essay co-written by Mishkat Bhattacharya, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published by The Conversation.

Before Elyse Rood started working on her senior physics capstone project, she didn’t envision herself working for a software company. But after the commencement ceremony on May 10, she is moving to Madison, Wis., to start a career as a technical solutions engineer at a healthcare software company called Epic Systems.

Optics and Photonics News features work by Mishkat Bhattacharya, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

While many people flock to warm destinations for spring break, two RIT experimental cosmologists spent theirs 6,800 feet high on snow-covered Kitt Peak at the Arizona Radio Observatory. They were deploying an instrument to a 12-meter telescope for a project called the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME), which aims to study the universe’s first stars and galaxies.