Groundbreaking study of binary star evolution is focus of new NSF grant
A new grant will help researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf learn more about “one of the most challenging phases in stellar astrophysics,” according to the National Science Foundation.
The nearly $300,000 project, which incorporates research opportunities for deaf and hard-of-hearing undergraduate students, will revolutionize how scientists understand a crucial phase of binary star evolution that rapidly shrinks the orbit of two stars to 0.1 percent of the distance from the Earth to the sun in only one year. This is the main method for forming tight binaries in the universe, such as binary black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, and many other classes of objects. But scientists have never seen it happen.