astrophysics – UofL News Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:56:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 UofL astrophysics research-backed startup acquired /section/science-and-tech/uofl-astrophysics-research-backed-startup-acquired/ Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:57:03 +0000 /?p=56252

A machinery monitoring technology startup backed by University of Louisville astrophysics research and founded by a UofL alumnus has been acquired.

The startup, RDI Technologies, is built on a UofL invention for detecting and visualizing tiny, otherwise imperceptible motion that may cause damage in bridges, machinery and other large objects. RDI has now been acquired by New York-based industrial and life sciences private equity firm, SFW Capital Partners LP.

“Our technology is already helping manufacturers, civil engineers and others lower costs and improve safety by predicting what maintenance will be needed,” said Jeff Hay, a UofL alum (PhD ’11, MA ’07, BA ’05) who founded RDI and now serves as its CEO. “This acquisition will help us scale and enter new markets.”

Hay invented the technology with UofL astrophysics researcher John Kielkopf, who mentored him as a doctoral student. The two received a grant to study micro-movements in bridges that can cause stress fractures and wearing, potentially making the structures less safe if left undetected and unaddressed.

To solve the problem, they turned to specialized camera techniques astrophysicists use to map the seemingly small movements of celestial bodies as we perceive them through the atmosphere. Hay and Kielkopf developed a new software that analyzed and amplified those captured movements, making them appear obvious and dramatic.

“The instruments you use to make very precise measurements and capture this kind of movement in the cosmos are exactly the same as the ones you’d use to measure movements on earth,” said Kielkopf, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “It’s just a matter of adjusting for the more terrestrial application.”

The two patented their invention through the UofL , and quickly began hearing from those in industry that there was a significant need for their monitoring and imaging capabilities. According to , Fortune Global 500 manufacturers are estimated to lose about $864 billion per year to unplanned machine downtime – about 8% of their annual revenues.

Hay, who had planned on being an astronomer after graduating from UofL with his doctorate, began to set sights on a new career as an entrepreneur, and launched RDI Technologies as its founder and CEO. Today, the company counts NASA, Apple, Nissan, Google, Honda and other big brands among its customers.

“When we started talking to people in industry (about the technology), we saw so much excitement and I knew this was the way to go,” he said. “But none of this would have happened without Dr. Kielkopf; he encouraged me to follow my passions and carve my own path, even if it wasn’t the one I was already on. His mentorship was instrumental.”

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UofL professor part of important cosmology discovery /section/arts-and-humanities/uofl-professor-part-of-important-cosmology-discovery/ Mon, 26 Jul 2021 15:26:32 +0000 http://www.uoflnews.com/?p=54007 A University of Louisville astronomy and astrophysics professor is part of an international team of researchers working on a discovery that could change one of the basic concepts of the cosmos.

Gerard Williger and two colleagues at the at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), in Preston, England, presented the research last month at a virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Williger, a fellow at the institute, is a co-advisor with UCLan’s Roger Clowes to UCLan PhD student Alexia Lopez. They are investigating Lopez’s discovery of an arc of galaxies in distant space they have named the Giant Arc.

Spanning 3.3 billion light years, the Giant Arc might be an indicator that scientists need to expand the size of what is considered a representative segment of all of space in the . This guiding principle holds that one portion of the cosmos is effectively the same as the rest, so findings from that segment apply to all of space.

“The Cosmological Principle tells us one part of the universe is pretty much the same as another part of the universe,” Williger said. “The Giant Arc is three times bigger than anything we’ve seen before. So maybe that principle has to have its size upgraded. How big is big enough to say this is an average piece of the universe?”

An published June 10 in Science News quoted Lopez as saying the discovery, if true, adds to a growing body of similar research that “would overturn cosmology as we know it.”

The arc was discovered by analyzing data from the .

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UofL researchers help find 20-some worlds on hunt for Earth-like planets /section/science-and-tech/uofl-researchers-help-find-20-some-worlds-on-hunt-for-earth-like-planets/ Thu, 15 Aug 2019 18:09:34 +0000 http://www.uoflnews.com/?p=47904 University of Louisville researchers are part of a team that has identified more than 20 new planets outside of our solar system — some of which may have the right conditions to support life.

The UofL is part of the ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program, which launched in spring 2018 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The mission is to identify Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars, with the UofL team helping verify results and figuring out the characteristics of the discovered planets.

The program has identified 20-some planets in its first year. According, citing a study in that includes a “rocky super-Earth” and two “sub-Neptunes.”

These three help fill inour understanding of how planets form, the article said, because they’re somewhere in between planets like Earth — rocky and small — andNeptune — gaseous and big.

“There’s kind of a gap in examples between these two,” saidDr. John Kielkopf, a professor of physics and astronomy at UofL and member of the TESS team.

The TESS satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blending of stars with one another.

The data and management for the TESS program are led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The ground-based partners, including UofL and its Moore Observatory, in Crestwood, Kentucky, will help check the information collected by the satellite, and expand on it.

“The data come back to us, and we analyze it to measure the transit events precisely, or in some cases to show that the event does not happen, or is mimicked by some other event,” Kielkopf said.“Our measurements improve on the precision of the satellite, and are used to find the radius of the planets and the exact times at which they pass in front of the star.

Dr. Karen Collins, who is leading the TESS follow-up program through Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, helped develop the software behind this research as part of her doctoral studies in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UofL. The software she developed is now widely used for studying planet candidates identified by the Kepler satellite and for TESS followup.

In addition to UofL’s Moore Observatory, university researchers and students will work with UofL’s telescopes at the Mt. Lemmon (Arizona) and Mt. Kent (Australia) observatories. The telescopes will use photometry and spectroscopy to measure the brightness of the star and speed of the planet’s orbit, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland.

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