Cosmic Cocktails: Explaining Cosmology with Drinks in the Outer Hebrides
I had the great pleasure of taking the g-Astronomy project to Scotland, on the kind invitation of the Hebridean Dark Skies Festival. One of the events was held at the An Lanntair arts centre, where in collaboration with Kirsty MacKinnon Lease and her team we devised a series of three cocktails to talk about cosmology in a fun, engaging and hopefully entertaining way.
Celebrating 70 years of Humanities at Imperial College London
Imperial College London is world-renowned for its research and education in science, technology, engineering, maths, medicine and business. It is perhaps less well known that the humanities have a long and fascinating history at Imperial: for 70 years, the arts, humanities and social sciences have enriched the cultural and intellectual life of Imperial’s staff and […]
Dining with Copernicus
In Sept 2018, I had the pleasure to be invited to take part to an “immersive dinner experience” organised by the Polish Cultural Institute in London. Combining theatre, history, astronomy and cuisine, the evening celebrated in an entertaining manner Polish history and the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus. I gave the “Astronomer’s Speech”, on the life […]
The Nature of Reality
FREE LECTURE SERIES 2019-20 The Nature of Reality Roberto Trotta, Visiting Professor of Cosmology All lectures are free on a first-come first served basis, but we can book for schools/ colleges on enquiries@gresham.ac.uk Monday 4 November 2019, 1pm, Museum of London Weighing the Universe The cosmic microwave background is the luminous echo of the primordial […]
Reflections on the Invisible
It’s a real pleasure to be one of the members of the AHRC Network “Picturing the Invisible”. The project brings together leading academics from a wide range of disciplines including Art & Design, Curatorial Practice, Literature, Forensic Science, Fashion, Medical Science, Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Philosophy, Astrophysics and Architecture with a shared interest in exploring how, […]
Multi-Sensory Cosmology
Multi-Sensory Cosmology (In collaboration with computer-human interaction expert Prof Marianna Obrist and her team at SCHI Lab at the University of Sussex) Much of our scientific knowledge is transmitted via intellectual means, based on abstract concepts and gained through reading and other mostly visual means. This modality of transmission can be hard to engage with […]
g-ASTRONOMY: The Universe, on the Tip of your Tongue
An exciting and innovative public engagement project, g-ASTRONOMY, will bring the wonders of the universe to people with sight loss through a multi-sensorial gastronomical experience on March 14th 2017. g-ASTRONOMY aims to break the assumption that astronomy and astrophysics can only be understood in terms of visual representation. By creating simple, elegant (and edible) metaphors […]
Today on the arXiv: Light echo gives insight into SNIa dust environment
I noticed this interesting paper using high resolution, multi-epoch images from Hubble to study the time evolution of the aftermath of the explosion of SNIa SN204J, which went off in 2014 in the nearby galaxy M82 (a mere 11 million light years away). The data show the presence of a radially expanding light echo, as well […]
Today on the arXiv: how to measure the intrinsic CMB dipole, and radio emission from DM in the Coma cluster
Elena Pierpaoli and her collaborator Slavash Yasini come up with a clever way of measuring the intrinsic CMB dipole, and disentangling it from the much bigger dipole induced by the Earth motion with respect to the CMB rest frame. The key idea is that leakage of the intrinsic dipole into the monopole and quadrupole induces […]
Today on the ArXiv: How to ride a light beam to the stars, and how not to analyse distance indicators
Today on the arXiv, a nice analysis of how to design a solar sail in such a way that the light beam powering it is prevented from rocking it side to side, and hence destabilising it. The key idea is to use a spherical sail (rather than conical designs as previously proposed) and a multi-modal laser […]
