Communicating scientific results to society is a delicate and important task. In fact, researchers from various disciplines go to schools daily to meet students and explain their discoveries. However, if researchers spent their lives explaining in classrooms what they do, they would have no time left to discover anything. This is where the role of teachers becomes central: they are the true link between the world of research and the young people who will one day be part of it.
It is precisely with this perspective that the project “The Lincei for a new school teaching, a national network” was conceived, promoted by the Foundation of the Accademia dei Lincei with the Foundation of Sardinia at the University of Cagliari (UNICA) on January 22, 2018 and at the University of Sassari (UNISS) on January 23, 2018. The two training evenings were organized by the representatives of the “Polo Sardegna” of the Academy, respectively by Prof. Sebastiano Seatzu and Prof. Piero Cappuccinelli, Academician of the Lincei, assisted by Prof. Marilena Formato. For the INAF, the Director of the Padua Observatory, Roberto Ragazzoni, the new Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Cagliari, Emilio Molinari, and researchers Marta Burgay, Matteo Murgia, and Gabriele Surcis participated.
Thus, the “training of trainers” is one of the winning keys for a society like Italy that needs innovation and ever-greater integration between scientific research and the productive world. Interestingly, as noted by the director of the Padua Observatory Roberto Ragazzoni in his speech, it was precisely astronomy that unlocked the stalemate in which some major Italian industrial realities found themselves after the referendum that rejected nuclear power in Italy. With those skills and technologies, which were already very solid at the time – says Ragazzoni – telescopes were then built for half of Europe. Lasers, lacquer, torches, and basins sealed and enriched a truly extraordinary intervention that thrilled teachers and, in the case of Sassari, also students selected by the professors.
Emilio Molinari, the new Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Cagliari, focused his speech (written with the President of INAF and former OAC director, Nichi D’Amico, who could not be present in person) precisely on the many futuristic observatory structures built around the world, among which, as is well known, the Sardinia Radio Telescope in San Basilio, a town not far from the Sardinian capital, stands out. Molinari emphasized how, given Italy’s participation in some major projects like the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) or SKA (Square Kilometer Array), the per capita cost for each Italian is truly negligible (just a few cents from each of our taxes) and how, ultimately, it is beneficial for our country to invest in great astronomical and astrophysical research.
Marta Burgay, an astrophysicist quite well-known to the general public for her discoveries about “pulsar” stars (see the Wikipedia page), spoke about their function as “cosmic clocks” and as demonstrators of the validity of Einstein’s theories on the deformation of “space-time.” Not content, Burgay recreated the magnetism of a pulsar with a beautiful experiment using magnets, batteries, and tin wire. Thanks to her ingenuity, this demonstration will be part of the upcoming educational workshops at the Observatory.
Another researcher recently joined the INAF-OAC is Gabriele Surcis, specializing in star-forming regions from which, thanks to radio telescopes like the SRT, he can extract a wealth of information about their composition, movements, and magnetic fields. The technique used for these observations is called “Very Long Baseline Interferometry” (VLBI) and involves the teamwork of numerous antennas located thousands of kilometers apart. Surcis explained the importance of managing the enormous amounts of data produced by radio telescopes and the delicacy of a role like that of the “data correlator” in the astronomical field.
Matteo Murgia, from Iglesias, is also a researcher at INAF in Cagliari and was the first to obtain and publish scientific results using the Sardinia Radio Telescope. His specialization is magnetic fields and black holes, but on this occasion, his speech focused on a new experimental project called “Sardinia Aperture Array Demonstrator” (SAD), a network of small, extremely low-cost antennas capable of scanning very large portions of the sky without having to move like traditional dishes. This pilot project serves to test this technology in anticipation of the construction of the world’s largest radio telescope: the Square Kilometer Array, a system of thousands of medium-small antennas located in South Africa and Australia that will be able to reveal what we cannot even imagine today in the coming decades.
At the end of the two-day scientific event, the outcome can only be extremely positive, considering that the presentations covered, for each day, over three hours of scientific explanations whose accuracy, according to the many teachers present, was not only not boring but was precisely the winning weapon that distinguished this training moment for the high quality of the content, guaranteed by a prestigious institution like the National Institute of Astrophysics.
Take a look at the event Gallery on our Outreach site.