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Teaching Activity planned by Irene Salmaso and Biagio Ambrosio during the PhD course “Designing innovative public engagement activities”, held at the University of Padua in 2024. Short Description of the Activity What does entropy mean, and how does it work? In this experience, through the use of colours and smells, it will be possible to perceive the different degrees of entropy which exist in more or less disorderly systems, in order to discover how it evolves with time. Materials Blue, red and yellow poster paints 3 food flavourings/different recognizable essentialLEGGI TUTTO

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Teaching activity planned by Leonardo De Deo, Greta Toni and Rachele Toniolo during the PhD course “Designing innovative public engagement activities” held at the University of Padova in 2024. Short description of the Activity Did you know that in the Universe there are objects behaving like clocks? We are talking about pulsars, peculiar stars emitting light pulses with an extremely precise rhythm. However, even the best sometimes miss a beat. In this laboratory, we will play with pulsars and their rhythm, and will discoverir how they are used to studyLEGGI TUTTO

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Teaching activity planned by Stefano Giarratana, Emanuele De Rubeis, Cristina Nanci, Xavier Lopez Lopez and Davide Pellicciari during the Phd course “Designing innovative public engagement activities” held at the University of Bologna in 2023. Short description of the activity: The galaxies which make up our Universe are of various types, each one with a different shape and features. The goals of this activity is discovering the main differences between two particular categories of galaxies: spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. Just like astronomers, we will find out which of the two containsLEGGI TUTTO

Crediti: Iaa-Csic/Uhu
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Haumea, or rather 136108 Haumea, whose discovery was officially announced in 2005, has been classified by the International Astronomical Union as a dwarf planet in 2008, and named after a Hawaiian goddess of fertility. The other recognized dwarf planets are  Pluto, Ceres, MakeMake and Eris. It is part of the “trans-neptunian” objects, namely beyond the orbit of Neptune, and is placed in the  Kuiper belt. It has a size comparable to Pluto, an “elongated” form  like a rugby ball, and is quite bright, the third brightest star in the Kuiper belt, after Pluto and Makemake,LEGGI TUTTO

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Teaching activity planned by Ettore Bronzini, Fabrizio Gentile, Greta Toni, and Massimiliano Matteuzzi during the PhD course “Designing innovative public engagement activities”, held at the University of Bologna in 2023. Brief description of the activity: Galaxies, such as many other celestial objects, appear different according to the instrument used to observe them. In this activity, we will fabrics of different texture, so as to represent the various components of one of them, thus making a personal galaxy-pin. Materials • Printouts of the Centaurus A Galaxy in different wavelenghts (if possibleLEGGI TUTTO

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Pluto is a dwarf planet placed in the Kuiper belt a doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Discovered in 1930, Pluto has long been considered the ninth planet of our Solar System. However, after the discovery of similar worlds in the Kuiper belt, it has been reclassified as dwarf planet. Pluto is smaller than the Moon, and lies about 5,8 billions km from the Sun. It has a thin atmosphere, mainly composed of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide. On average, the temperature of Pluto is -232°C, andLEGGI TUTTO

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Netpune is  the last planet of the Solar System in order of distance from the Sun. It takes Neptune almost 165 years to travel along an orbit around our star, and a little more than 16 hours to complete one full turn around itself. The picture on the right – taken by the Voyager 2 probe in 1989 – shows the presence of the Big Dark Spot, a system of storms with an average diametre of 14.000 km, which represents one of the largest atmospheric structures of the Solar System, afterLEGGI TUTTO

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Saturn is the sixth planet of the Solar System in order of distance from the Sun and can be easily recognized by the series of rings surrounding it, mainly composed of principalmente da ice and dust. Saturn is classified as a gaseous planet, i.e. mainly composed of gas. Just like Jupiter,  its atmosphere is lashed by continuous winds, which can even reach 1800 km/h. In its North Pole there is a particular nebula called Saturn’s Exagon, which rotates around the central vortex of the North Pole. A unique feature in the whole Solar System!LEGGI TUTTO

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Jupiter is the fifth planet of the Solar System  in order of distance from the Sun, and the largest of the whole Solar System: its mass is twice and a half the sum of the masses of all the other planets together! Jupiter is classified as a gaseous planet, namely mainly composed of gas. Its huge atmosphere is characterized by several bands, inside which we can observe the presence of numerous storms. Among them, the Big Red Spot stands out, an anticyclonic storms which has been going on for at least 300 years! HereLEGGI TUTTO

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On February 18, 2021, shortly before 10 pm Italian time, Perseverance – the rover of the Nasa Mars 2020 mission – landed successfully on the surface of Mars. While humankind waited, breathless, imagining the ground of the red Planet quickly approaching the rover, something looked upwards, towards the sky covered by the large parachute. At first, nobody noticed, engrossed by the sand lifting up all around the rover, the stones, the pictures which Perseverance immediately gave us. However, within a few hours, someone went to review the images, and looking at the openLEGGI TUTTO

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On November 16, 1974, from the radiotelescope of Arecibo, a peculiar radio message was sent out into space, towards the Hercules Globular Cluster, 25 thousand year-lights away from the Earth. The message was composed of 1679 binary digits (zero and one), one after the other. Why 1679? This number is the product of two prime numbers: 23 and 73. In this way, supposing that anyone receving it decides to order it in a quadrilateral, he/she will only be able to do this by ordering it in 23 lines and 73 columns, or 73 lines and 23LEGGI TUTTO

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On  April 10, 2019, the researchers of the Event Horizon Telescope revealed to humankind the first image ever obtained of a  supermassive black hole, a black hole much more massive of normal stellar black holes. The image uncovers the black hole at the centre of a huge galaxy in the nearby  Virgo cluster, Messier 87. This black hole is 55 millions light-years away from us, and a mass of 6.5 and a half billions times the one of the Sun. Black holes are extremely compact objects, in which an incredible quantityLEGGI TUTTO