In Piazza dei Miracoli, images of the universe have never been seen before

In Piazza dei Miracoli to see photosUniverse As never before, an unforgettable night organized by the Department of Physics of the University of Pisa, in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Opera della Primaziali Pisana.

On Friday, July 22, the results of the James Webb Space Telescope, the most advanced and technically complex space telescope ever built, whose images have gone viral around the world in recent days, will be shown to the public. Thus, the “cosmology” of the past and the present will serve as a bridge between the centuries. The images, revealing an infrared universe invisible as humanity has never seen it, offer a vision of the future starting with Fibonacci and Galileo in the enchanting wonders of Piazza dei Miracoli.

The flow into the square will begin at 10 pm and a quarter of an hour later there will be introductory and welcome speeches by the Archbishop of Pisa, Giovanni Paolo Binotto, teachers and students in the Department of Physics. there prediction From the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope from 10:30 p.m. to 11.15 p.m., followed by the sighting of deep-sky objects until midnight, in collaboration with the Cascinese Astrofili Association. The event, which represents one of the first international public editions planned to publish the results of the space telescope, will take place in complete darkness in order to allow telescopic viewing on site.

Initiative Entrance Free No reservation is required. Presentations will be in Italian and English.

Launched on December 25, 2021, the Webb Telescope took several weeks to reach its observation site 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, settle in the frigid cold of space, open up along the way like a butterfly and then arrive. Unlike the previous Hubble Space Telescope, which was in low Earth orbit, Webb was designed to look in the dark without obstructing the atmosphere and to have a long life without human intervention.

The telescope was designed by observing infrared radiation of a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to the human eye, like a window into the cold universe. Here the tiniest objects in the galaxy emit light: stars are still immersed in interstellar clouds and planetary systems born in disks around protostars. It is also where the light of the farthest galaxies in the universe becomes visible, from the first stars during the first hundreds of millions of years after the cosmic expansion began.