Gaia and the Galaxy as No One Has Ever Seen It Before
Imagine a very powerful scanner, which does not find the positions of ink dots on a sheet of paper, but those of the stars in our Galaxy. And these also change over time! This is Gaia. A satellite of the European Space Agency that for more than 10 years has been scanning the sky to produce the most complete and precise star map in history. But how do we do it? Why are we doing it? All your curiosities will be satisfied by listening to the two scientists guests of the evening, who, together with other scientists scattered throughout Europe, have worked on this project since its inception.
Free entry
Speakers:
Deborah Busonero is INAF Senior Researcher at the Turin Astrophysical Observatory. She has been working on ESA’s Gaia mission since its early design stages about twenty years ago when she was still a graduate student in Physics at Pisa. In particular, she is the scientific director of the Italian Gaia data processing center located in ALTEC in Turin. She is part of the small group of European experts who have followed the Gaia telescope throughout its 10-year life to ensure that the observations provided had all the expected characteristics to allow the unique discoveries that Gaia is slowly providing. Her main fields of research are in fact the modeling and design and development of complex systems for monitoring and calibration of innovative space instrumentation for very high-precision astrometric measurements. He holds important roles at national level: he is President of the INAF national scientific group of Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation and member of the INAF Scientific Management Unit that deals with everything concerning the problems related to calculation for large research projects in astrophysics with planning and control tasks.
Mariateresa Crosta is Senior Researcher of INAF at the Turin Astrophysical Observatory. Her main fields of research are local cosmology and the reconstruction of our Galaxy with Einstein’s theory, gravitational waves, tests of fundamental physics in space and space-time navigation. For decades, she has worked in the ESA Gaia mission; in particular, she is responsible for the theoretical comparison of relativistic models and starlight deflection tests in the context of the Gaia consortium for data processing and analysis. She created the interdisciplinary event The Time Machine Factory [speakeable, unspeakbale] on time travels” focused on the possibility of time travel in collaboration with INRiM, SIGRAV and UniTo (Dept. of Mathematics) in order to generate new frontiers and synergies in astrometry, astrophysics, mathematics, space technologies and quantum physics.
She is also very active in cultural astronomy, she is a member of the Scientific Council of INFINI.to for INAF and she contributed to several multidisciplinary events in the context of the Gaia mission for ASI and INAF.
