Understanding our Universe and Alien Civilisations

Looking at the Universe with only visible light gives us a very narrow view. The Universe is a dusty place and dust is excellent at blocking visible light. We now have telescopes that can allow us to view the Universe at every wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum from long radio waves to very short, high-energy gamma rays. The galaxies that I will be talking about weren’t even discovered until we started to map the Universe with ‘sub-millimetre’ telescopes and once they were detected they transformed our understanding of star formation in the early Universe.

If I told you a story set on a planet with clouds of rubies, would you believe it? How about one made of hot ‘ice’, at over 400°C? Or one with three suns, or winds so strong that it rains horizontally? Sometimes the universe is more bizarre than the wildest science fiction and there are potentially billions of planets in our galaxy to discover. Join me in exploring some of the weirdest ones we’ve found so far.

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered ‘Are we alone?’ The most promising place to look for life-bearing planets is in the Goldilocks Zone, a region around a star with just the right conditions to find liquid water on the planet’s surface. In this talk Maria utilizes the most recent scientific results to estimate the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in our own galaxy using the infamous and controversial Drake Equation.