RIT in the news: Shooting for the stars!

The discovery of dusty disks—the building blocks of planets—around two of the most massive stars known suggests that planets might form and survive in surprisingly hostile environments.

Say what?!

Okay, I know, this is heady stuff, but a recent string of galactic discoveries coming out of RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science has a lot of important people sitting up and taking notice. Professor Joel Kastner led the team that made this recent discovery using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. While pitching news like this is a tough sell to our local media, you can bet there are a lot of journals and trade publications that are eating this up. Check out this entry from CNN.com:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/02/09/mega.solar.systems.ap/index.html

Yeah, heady stuff, but it’s prompting a meteoric rise in RIT’s reputation as a first-rate research institution!