Inside and outside Earth

Daniel will be talking about the reasons astronomers always build their telescopes on top of mountains, as space telescopes outside of Earth’s atmosphere or even on airplanes as flying observatories. He will explain how he “is getting high” himself to chase Alien Worlds – planets outside our solar system – and how he measures their atmospheric composition. Finally Dr. Angerhausen will show how our generation is the first in history that has a realistic chance to answer the millennia old question: “Are we alone in the Universe?”

The stars in the sky not only look pretty but also have a connection to the beer you are enjoying. The contents of a pint of beer (water, alcohol, tasty ingredients) are made up of chemical elements like Carbon and Oxygen and many others. All of these were created in stars which have existed billions of years ago. In this presentation a brief overview is given of how this happened and how science uncovers the details of the underlying processes.

Our buildings are not designed to live forever and actually every second building in Europe reached its expiration date. At the same time the increasing frequency of natural disasters is of significant risk to our infrastructure and society. We cannot afford replacing all obsolete assets and thus we need to exploit every byte of data to make most out of our buildings. Structural health monitoring helps to translate ambient vibrations due to wind or traffic into structural condition metrics. Essentially, we put our structures in the intensive care and so we maximize their safe operational life!