Martin Rees: From Big Bang to the Biospheres

posted by @ulaulaman about #MartinRees #BigBang #universe #astronomy

In order to celebrate the anniversary the first observation from x-ray astonomy, the Brera's Astronomical Observatory in Milano organized the international congress X-ray Astronomy: toward the next 50 years!
To the edge of the scientific congress, the organization propose also some public events, starting from the first day, the 1st october, with a talk by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees.

From Big Bang to the Biospheres is a great journey in the story of the astronomy, the older science, starting from Galileo Galilei, with the invention of the telescope, and Isaac Newton, with the page from Principia about the escape velocity from Earth.

We immediatly jump to the space exploration, with the launch of the Sputnik and the Time's cover dedicated to the first man in space: Yuri Gagarin. Of course also a bit homage to the first man on Moon: Neil Armstrong.

The exploration of space continued with the satellites mission: the european Mars Express, with its spectacular images, and the last Mars' rover, Curiosity.
And after the exploration of Jupiter's satellites (Io, Europa), it arrives Cassini with its spectacular shots, in particular the Sun eclipsed by Saturn and the Huygens descending and landing on Titan.

Robots explore solar system but will follow people!

The next step in our research is to find planets beyond our Solar System: in order to perform this quest we could use two methods: the gravitational lens and the transition.
Using the first method we found 555 planets, Jupiter- and Saturn-like, but if we want to find Earth-like planets we must use the transition method, and this is the reason of the design and launch of Kepler mission.
Also the exploration with telescope could be most useful for our purpouse. We can use space telescopes, like the famouse Hubble Space Telescope, or the Earth telescopes, like the ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, that will be the greatest telescope on the planet!
With the telescopes we can observe a lot of space objects, like supernovae. The first observation of these wonderful explosions is dued by chinese astronomers, but only with Fred Hoyle we have a really powerfull theory about these objects and the nuclear interactions involving in it.
These interstellar explotions are very important in the diffusion of the heavy chemichal elements in the universe, but there are other spectacular interactions like galaxies collisions, that could be described thanks to computer simulations:

Computer simulations are wonderful tools to the knowledge of the universe.

But the matter was carried in the universe not only by supernovae but before by the big bang, the graet expansion of the spacetime ... years ago.

Following Rees we could describe our universe using some Escher's illustration: first of all the print Cubic space division, that is perfect to describe the anisotropy of the spacetime (or the absence of a privilaged direction)

but Angel and Devil adds also the concept of the expansion.

About our universe theorists have developed a lot of idea starting from quantum mechanics paradoxes, like the many worlds theory or the braneworlds and so on, but the most important challenge for the physics of the future is the unification between macro and micro

The journey is concluded on our planet, the Earth, our biosphere, without forgot one of the countless simulation about dark matter:

Eternity is really long, especially near the end
(Woody Allen)