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.
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: