"How to Find Invisible Planets and Black Holes" — a talk with Prof. Łukasz Wyrzykowski, DSc

"How to Find Invisible Planets and Black Holes" — a talk with Prof. Łukasz Wyrzykowski

📅 When: February 7, 5:00 PM
Location: Terminal Kultury Gocław

Some objects in our Galaxy — the Milky Way — do not emit light, making them undetectable with traditional observational methods. Prof. Łukasz Wyrzykowski will introduce listeners to the technique of gravitational microlensing — a unique tool that allows the detection of lonely planets (wandering and not permanently bound to any star) and black holes solely based on their gravitational effect on the light of distant stars. During the lecture we will learn the background of a recent precise measurement of the mass of a free-floating planet and find out what these rare phenomena, recorded by the Polish OGLE project and the European Gaia space mission, teach us about the evolution of the cosmos.

• Special guest: Prof. Łukasz Wyrzykowski, DSc (Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw; Astrophysics Department of the National Centre for Nuclear Research). An astronomer involved in many international projects; he has lectured and worked, among others, in Cambridge, Tel Aviv and Santa Barbara. He conducts research on black holes and dark matter, using, among other methods, microlensing; involved in the Gaia mission, the OGLE project and the ENGRAVE consortium. In 2025 he founded the EASST.eu foundation.
• Host: Paweł Ziemnicki. Connected with space topics since 2011, when he started working at the Niebo Kopernika Planetarium (Copernicus Science Centre). Currently Head of the Office of the Association of Employers of the Space Sector; as a journalist he has conducted numerous interviews and is the author of the book "Kosmos. Gwiezdna Podróż".

🎫 Tickets available on the portal https://bilety.io/Y4chj and at the Terminal Kultury Gocław box office from January 26.