Virgo and Einstein Telescope at Biblioteca delle Oblate in Florence

On Wednesday 17 April at 6 p.m., at the Sibilla Aleramo Conference Room of the Oblate Library in Florence, the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), in collaboration with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the Galileo Museum, is organising ‘The challenge of gravitational waves: from Virgo to the Einstein Telescope’.

We will set off on a journey from Pisa to the depths of a mine in Sardinia, passing through black holes and neutron stars, to the most remote place we know, the Big Bang. Accompanying us will be Gianluca Gemme, international scientific coordinator of Virgo, and Silvia Piranomonte, researcher at the National Institute of Astrophysics and involved in the Einstein Telescope project, with the moderation of Matteo Serra, science journalist.

Einstein Telescope is one of Europe’s major research projects with world-class scientific impact, and Italy is one of the candidate countries to host it, in Sardinia in the area of the disused Sos Enattos mine in the Nuoro area. ET will be able to observe a volume of the universe at least a thousand times larger than the current gravitational wave detectors, the LIGO interferometers in the United States and Virgo, in the Pisan countryside. These scientific collaborations first observed gravitational waves, predicted a hundred years earlier by Albert Einstein, in 2015, a discovery that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017. On 10 April, LIGO and Virgo will return to observe the universe through gravitational waves for their fourth observing period, O4, which will last until early 2025.