Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Heidi Jo Newberg, Ph.D., professor of astronomy; Tom Donlon, Ph.D., a visiting researcher at Rensselaer and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alabama; and their team have recently published research that reveals a shocking discovery about the history of our universe: the Milky Way Galaxy’s last major collision occurred billions of years later than previously thought.

Brianna Casey ’26 is one of 40 undergraduate students nationwide to be selected for NASA’s Europa ICONS (Inspiring Clipper: Opportunities for Next-Generation Scientists) internship program. The program supports the Europa Clipper mission, with the goal of determining whether Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has “conditions suitable to support life.” Scientists predict that an ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy shell, so massive that it is bigger than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

In a ceremony that featured a reading by Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, winners for the 83rd annual McKinney Writing Contest at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were announced on April 19.

Two students in the Bachelor of Architecture program have been selected for the 2024 Metropolis Future100.