This event will bring together renowned scientists and astronauts to talk about their research and expeditions
At every scale, our Universe is composed of the same particles. This Universe of particles is at the heart of the International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), which kicks off its 39th edition on Monday, 14 July. The astroparticle specialists who meet there, like the physicists working on experiments at CERN, share a desire to understand our Universe by studying its fundamental constituents.
A special event will take place as part of the conference. The general public and the scientific community are invited to Science Gateway on 19 July to meet Nobel Prize winners and astronauts at the Stellar soirée.
Samuel Ting, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics, will present AMS, the dark matter detector mounted on the International Space Station. Barry Barish, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, will look back on the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, a real leap forward for contemporary science. Takaaki Kajita, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, will talk about neutrinos, the mysterious and elusive particles that pervade our Universe. Michel Mayor, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, will explain the path that led to the discovery of exoplanets. He will be sharing the stage with Meganne Christian, a reserve astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), who was selected at the same time as Slawosz Uznański, who has just returned from space. In this discussion, Meganne Christian and Michel Mayor will describe their respective journeys to the Moon and the Nobel Prize.
Three other ESA Astronauts will also share their experiences: Paolo Nespoli, who spent more than 300 days on board the International Space Station; Matthias Maurer, who will be talking about exploration of the Moon; and Luca Parmitano, who will be speaking live from the NASA Space Center in Houston and has made four spacewalks to perform maintenance on the AMS experiment.
Stellar will also be offering a host of fun activities, including an interactive science village with workshops, Apollo simulators where you can step into the shoes of an astronaut, and access to the Science Gateway exhibitions. The evening will be punctuated by live music, and stands will be serving refreshments.
You can consult the full programme here. For those unable to attend in person, the talks will be streamed on YouTube.
Speakers
- Barry C. Barish, experimental physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
- Michel Mayor, astrophysicist, Nobel Prize in Physics 2019
- Takaaki Kajita, particle physicist, Director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo, Nobel Prize in Physics 2015
- Samuel Chao Chung Ting, physicist, Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Prize in Physics 1976
- Meganne Christian, ESA Reserve Astronaut, Exploration Commercialisation Lead at the UK Space Agency
- Matthias Maurer, ESA Astronaut
- Paolo Nespoli, ESA and ASI Astronaut
- Luca Parmitano, ESA Astronaut and Colonel in the Italian Air Force
- Patrizia Caraveo, astrophysicist, neutron star specialist
- Teresa Montaruli, astroparticle physicist
- Clara Nellist, particle physicist