The event is aimed at the CERN community and CERN Alumni and Retirees, therefore physical attendance will require having a valid CERN access card. 

CERN Alumni should use this form to request CERN access cards.

The authors of the "The stars' last dance" ("La dernière danse des étoiles") will give a talk at the CERN Library:

Black holes, spacetime and gravitational waves are topics attracting the curiosity of everyone. However, while there exist several books for teenagers and adults, there are not so many books for young children. Our aim is to introduce black holes, curvature of space-time and gravitational waves to kids, boosting their imagination and triggering their interest. We have written 4 short stories with the main protagonist a young girl, Chloé, who is curious to understand on what her astrophysicist mum is working. “Chloé and the twin stars” is the story of two twin stars at the end of their life, that do not want to be apart anymore. They dance and spun around, and they are so happy that they want to tell the other stars, so they send special messengers -- gravitational waves -- all over space. With simple examples, familiar to kids, we introduce the notion of these special messengers, their effects, with a hint on the pressure and hard work of researchers in the frontiers of science. “Chloé at the planetarium” focuses on the life and death of stars and it takes place at the planetarium. We discuss constellations, a bit of Greek mythology, the life of stars and the shapes and properties of galaxies. This story is necessary to explain what black holes are and how they are born. “Chloé and space-time” presents with simple examples of daily life, the structure of space-time as Chloé and her family are spending the day in the mini-golf. “Chloé and the origin of gold” aims at describing the origin of gold, while the young protagonist, Chloé, is celebrating with her mum a successful exam in the conservatory. We also include a glossary that a parent or a teacher, who is not an astrophysicist, may use as a dictionary. The book is aimed at children ages 6-10 years old.

The event will be followed by a Q&A and signing sessions. The book is available from the CERN Library & Bookshop in English and French.

About the authors: 

Mairi Sakellariadou, Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London. She has studied Mathematics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and obtained her PhD in Physics at Tufts University (USA). She worked at the Universities of Brussels, Tours, Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne University), Zurich, Geneva, and at the theory division of CERN. She was then Professor of General Relativity at the NKUA.
Her research covers various aspects of theoretical physics, cosmology, classical and quantum gravity, particle physics, as well as astrophysics. Using a blend of theoretical developments and observational/experimental data, she aims at unravelling the mysteries of the Universe.
Sakellariadou is member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the LISA Consortium, the Einstein Telescope (ET) Observational Science Board (OSB) and the European Pulsar Timing Array. She co-chairs the stochastic group of the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Collaboration and the Cosmology division of the ET-OSB. She is the President of the European Physical Society, and Editor-in-Chief of “General Relativity and Gravitation” (Springer Nature).
 
 
Tania Regimbau, Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research. She completed her studies and doctoral thesis at the University of Nice, has since worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, at Cardiff University, at the Observatory of the Côte d'Azur, and is currently working at Laboratory of Particle Physics at Annecy.  
Regimbau is an astrophysicist working in the field of gravitational waves, and member of the Virgo Collaboration; she received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with her colleagues in 2016 for the first detection of a gravitational wave in September 2015.
Her main goal in the next years is the detection of the gravitational-wave background formed by all the unresolved compact binaries in the Universe. She co-chairs the data analysis division of the Einstein Telescope Observational Science Board.