Cosmology and fundamental physics with current and future
ESO facilities
3rd Azores School on Observational Cosmology
5th Azores International Advanced School in Space Sciences27 August - 02 September 2017, Angra do Heroísmo, Açores, PortugalPublic eventsThe school will include a cycle of 4 public talks, complemented by stargazing sessions, whose detailed schedule is below.
Three of these talks will be in Angra do Heroísmo Public Library (Terceira Island), given by
Joe Liske (in English),,
Paolo Molaro (in English) and
Carlos Martins (in Portuguese). The fourth talk will be at OASA (S. Miguel island), given by
Bruno Leibundgut (in English). All those interested are welcome to attend. Admission is free, up to the room's capacity.
A series of starganzing sessions will take place at various venues in Terceira island. Please note that these are subject to weather conditions. An up-to-date list of venues and times can be found
here. The public library will also host
this exhibition.
The discovery of waves in space and time Joe Liske (Hamburg)Monday 28 August, 21h, Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Regional Luís da Silva Ribeiro (Angra do Heroísmo) Just over 100 years ago, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, which to this day represents our best understanding of gravity. The revolutionary thing about this theory was that it replaced the traditional view of space and time being a static, passive stage on which the laws of physics are played out, with the concept of a dynamic and pliable spacetime. This notion included the spectacular prediction that spacetime could oscillate and that it could support the propagation of waves - just like the surface of the ocean. For decades physicists all around the world have tried to detect these ghostly "gravitational waves". They finally succeeded in February 2016: the scientists of the LIGO experiment announced that they had caught the faint echo of two merging black holes. How was this sensational discovery possible? What exactly did they find?
Joe Liske is professor of Observational Astronomy at Hamburg University in Germany. Having obtained his Ph.D. in Sydney, Australia, he was a researcher at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh in Scotland before spending several years working on the world's largest telescope at the European Southern Observatory. He now spends his time trying to understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way formed - using huge surveys of the sky - and teaches astrophysics at Hamburg University.
The History of the Telescope Paolo Molaro (Trieste)
Wednesday 30 August, 21h, Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Regional Luís da Silva Ribeiro (Angra do Heroísmo) Who invented the telescope? After 4 centuries we still do not know precisely the genesis of the 'device to see at distance', which appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands and was then developed by Galileo to make discoveries that changed the history of the humanity. The birth of the astronomical telescope, i.e. the one made by two convex lenses, which after Galileo became 'the' telescope for centuries is also mysterious. We provide new evidence that the inventor was the Neapolitan Francesco Fontana. Newton's reflecting telescope invented around 1668 remains the concept of the large telescopes in use today, in which the primary mirror can be monolithic as in the four 8.2 m telescopes of the ESO-Very Large Telescope or segmented, as first conceived by Arturo Horn and implemented in the two 10m Keck telescopes. In my lecture I will follow the timeline from the aereal telescopes to those made by William Herchel and Lord Rosse to end with the very large telescopes in use today or planned for the next decades. From a very simple device the telescope developed into a very sophisticated machine to which we owe much of our understanding of our own Universe.
Paolo Molaro is full professor of Astronomy at the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, where he started working since 1987 and of which he was director from 2001 to 2003. He graduated in Trieste with Margherita Hack in 1981 and did the PhD at SISSA with prof. Denis Sciama in 1987. His interests include primordial nucleosynthesis and light element abundances, extremely metal poor stars, primeval galaxies and observational cosmology in general. He is instrument scientist of the innovative spectrograph ESPRESSO, starting next year at the ESO-VLT. Recently he developed an interest in the history of Astronomy. He has more othan 400 publications to his credit with almost 9000 citations.
A física do Big Bang Carlos Martins (Porto)
Sexta-feira 1 de Setembro, 21h, Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Regional Luís da Silva Ribeiro (Angra do Heroísmo) Nos últimos 20 anos aprendemos mais sobre a origem e a evolução do Universo do que em todo o resto da história da humanidade. Esta palestra descreverá o estado actual da Cosmologia (o chamado modelo do Big Bang, embora, como veremos, o termo seja usado de forma diferente por cosmólogos e por leigos) e os seus grandes desafios futuros. O principal é o facto de observações recentes sugerirem que 96% do conteúdo do Universo se encontrar em formas (conhecidas como matéria escura e energia escura) que não emitem luz nem foram ainda detectadas experimentalmente em laboratório, sendo apenas conhecidas pelos seus efeitos gravitacionais. Uma nova geração de telescópios e satélites tentará, na próxima década, caracterizar este lado escuro do Universo.
Carlos Martins licenciou-se em Física/Matemática Aplicada (Universidade do Porto) em 1993, e doutorou-se em Física Teórica na Universidade de Cambridge em 1997. Trabalha na fronteira entre a astrofísica, a cosmologia e a física de partículas, nomeadamente em testes observacionais de teorias do Universo primordial. Em 2010 recebeu o prémio Outstanding Referee da Sociedade Norte Americana de Física, que distingue os melhores investigadores que participam no processo de arbitragem de artigos científicos. Desde 2012 é membro da equipa científica que acompanha a construção do Extremely Large Telescope e coordenador da Unidade de Formação do CAUP. Nesse ano criou também o AstroCamp, um programa académico na área da astronomia e física para alunos do ensino secundário.
Seeing the Invisible: The discovery of Dark Energy Bruno Leibundgut (ESO)
Friday 1 September, 21h, OASA (S. Miguel) What is in the Universe? Have will observed all there is or are there components, which have not been discovered? These questions are the basis of all cosmologies and have been asked for centuries. Today, we have a framework in which we can attempt to answer these questions. The discovery of Dark Energy - honoured with the 2011 Physics Nobel Prize - is an example of how modern astrophysical methods are applied to discover a major component of the Universe. The observations and their interpretation that led to the detection of 75% of the Universe's content will be presented.
An observational astronomer, Bruno Leibundgut has studied stellar explosions and their applications in cosmology. He participated in one of the two teams discovering the accelerated expansion, which was honoured by the Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2007, Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2015. After studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland, he held postdoctoral positions at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the European Southern Observatory (ESO) as staff astronomer. At ESO he served in several positions related to the development of the operations of the Very Large Telescope and the scientific direction of the organisation.
