To the Edge of the Universe

How did our universe evolve from a simple beginning to its present complexity? Why is it expanding, and what lies beyond it? Does life exist on other planets?

In a fascinating talk that explored the solar system and beyond, Lord Martin Rees, eminent astronomer from Cambridge University, addressed some of the most challenging questions facing astronomers and physicists during a "Frontiers in Physics" lecture titled  "From Big Bang to Biosphere: Progress and Prospects in Space Science" at the Industrial Physics Forum being held this week at ICTP.

Rees's space survey started close to home, with an overview of exploratory missions to Mars, Jupiter's satellites Io and Europa, and Saturn, and expressed his hope that someday humans might be able to make these high-risk journeys themselves.

Rees then extended his sights beyond the telescope, reviewing techniques such as optical spectroscopy that can infer the presence of planets based on the motions of distant stars. He said that by June 2011, this technique had inferred 555 planets of masses similar to Jupiter or Saturn.

For those hoping to find a new planet Earth, Rees explained that the Kepler Mission sponsored by the US NASA programme has detected evidence of several hundred Earth-sized planets. The next step is to directly observe these inferences, and to that end projects such as the European Extremely Large Telescope could be capturing images of distant planets within decades.

Whether those Earth-sized planets support life depends on us developing our own understanding of how life started on Earth. "Only when we know if life on Earth was a fluke or not will we be able to start looking for similar planets," said Rees.

Other presentations during the "Frontiers in Physics" session included one on optical communications by Solomon Assefa, researcher at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Assefa, who was designated by MIT as one of the world's top young innovators for 2011, has developed a device called a nanophotonic photodetector, a device that receives optical signals and converts them to electrical signals. The nanophotonic device has the potential to pioneer low-cost, energy-efficient high performance computing and has crucial implications for the future of electronics.

The "Frontiers" session ended with a presentation by Andrew Briggs of Oxford University on quantum nanotechnology.

The 2012 Industrial Physics Forum is being held at ICTP during the week of 16 April. For more details about the programme, please visit the Forum's website.