EGO and Virgo in Lucca at Comics&Science Palace

From November 1st to November 5th, in Lucca, at the Lucca Comics & Games, EGO and Virgo will participate in the Comics&Science Palace initiative, A hub, in the heart of the city and with free admission, all dedicated to science and comics. Authors, characters, museums, foundations, institutes, researchers will give life to a rich program of shows, meetings, workshops, games, meet&greet and much more.

Below are all the appointments with EGO-Virgo and the science of gravitational waves!

• Thursday 2 – 5 p.m.
  Stories of women who changed The Universe
  With Diana Hobel and Gabriele Peddes

Our view of the Universe has changed dramatically in the past hundred years, as never before. Among the people who have helped build this new image of our Universe are many women, whose great insights and discoveries are intertwined with the extraordinary stories of their lives. Compelling stories that will be embodied before our eyes thanks to Diana Hobel’s narration, and Gabriele Peddes’ drawings.

• Friday 3 – 6 p.m.
  How do you draw a gravitational wave? Gabriele Peddes and Julia Casanueva. Moderator: Vincenzo Napolano

Virgo is a large gravitational antenna, which is located in the countryside of Cascina, near Pisa and picks up gravitational waves: deformations of space-time, generated by the terrifying collisions of black holes and neutron stars. But how does one imagine these remote cosmic earthquakes? How do you draw a gravitational wave? And what does the experiment capable of detecting them look like? Thanks to drawings by Gabriele Peddes and Virgo researcher Julia Casanueva, we will set off on a journey of images and drawings to discover Virgo and the Cosmos it allows us to explore.

• Saturday 4 – 3 p.m.
  Black holes and time travel, between science and science fiction
  With Giancarlo Cella interviewed by Giada Rossi

Teleportation, time travel, wormholes, parallel universes: these are words that belong to science fiction, but they exist thanks to a fervid scientific imagination, which the most recent discoveries in astrophysics are only expanding. Giancarlo Cella is a member of the Virgo Collaboration, which, thanks to gravitational waves, has been studying black holes, neutron stars and space-time deformations, some of the topics that have sparked scifi imagination in the past 20 years.

• Friday 3 and Saturday 4 – 10:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
  The sound of the universe
  Workshop for children ages 6 to 12 years old

The Virgo gravitational wave detector is a huge ear listening to the cosmos, but at the same time, in order to pick up the faint signals coming from deep space, it is constantly listening and monitoring everything that happens in the environment: the wind, the impact of sea waves on the Tyrrhenian coast, small and large earthquakes, but also all man-made noises, signals and ‘disturbances’. In this workshop we will play at listening and distinguishing, as Virgo does, between cosmic and environmental or man-made sounds.

The workshop is for children ages 6 to 12, accompanied by parents or in class groups. Reservations are required by sending an email to info@ego-gw.it.