Ragazzoni: There's still a lot to discover about gravitational waves.

The discovery of gravitational waves is 10 years old , and despite the great progress made in this period, what we see is only the tip of the iceberg , just as with the planets outside the Solar System . According to Roberto Ragazzoni, president of the National Institute for Astrophysics, there is still much to discover. He said this at the conference of scientific and space officials and agricultural experts organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Naples and hosted by INAF at the Capodimonte Observatory. In the field of gravitational waves, "there is still a great deal to do ." The Einstein Telescope , which Italy has applied to host, "is one of the facilities that will allow us to observe these sources with greater depth and sensitivity ." Thanks to that discovery ten years ago and the subsequent arrival of multi-messenger astronomy , which uses different cosmic messengers, " we look at the universe differently ." The challenge is to capture cosmic collisions that appear suddenly, and for this reason "we monitor the sky with gamma-ray, optical, and radio astronomy." For this reason, he added, INAF is building Cherenkov telescopes in the Canary Islands and participating in the international Square Kilometer Array project, which envisions a square kilometer of antennas between South Africa and Australia. But over the last 10-20 years, the study of planets outside the Solar System has also changed. "Europe is about to launch Plato , the space telescope to search for Earth-like exoplanets." It would be necessary to build telescopes that simultaneously survey the entire sky, and this "would require a huge amount of data collection." For Ragazzoni, "it is no longer possible for a single astronomer to be able to see objects in his office, no matter how powerful his computer is: he must rely on machines, for example artificial intelligence."