On the evening of Tuesday 30 September 2025, RSC Belgium welcomed Professor Gwenhaël de Wasseige from the Universite Catholique de Louvain to talk to us about her exciting work on neutrinos and other astronomical phenomena. Her talk was a real eye-opener to the world of new ways of observing our universe through 'multi-messenger' astronomy - in particular extremely sensitive, cutting-edge research to detect neutrinos.
Most of what we know about our Universe today comes from the observation of visible light. To improve our understanding of the numerous exotic phenomena that populate the sky, we need to enlarge the spectrum of our observations. Furthermore, adding new cosmic messengers provides extra pieces to help solve the puzzles of the universe. In the talk, Professor Gwenhaël de Wasseige reviewed the status of multi-messenger astronomy and discussed the pros and cons of each messenger to study some of the most violent events in the universe.
Professor de Wasseige is an astroparticle physicist and a member of both the IceCube and KM3NeT collaborations and her main work is focused on low-energy (MeV-GeV) neutrinos coming from transient events, such as solar flares, core-collapse supernovae, and compact binary star mergers.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was the first detector of its kind, designed to observe the cosmos from deep within the Antarctic ice. Encompassing a cubic kilometre of ice, IceCube searches for nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos. These high-energy astronomical messengers provide information to probe the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.
The KM3NeT collaboration is developing the next generation neutrino telescopes with telescope detector volumes between a megaton and several cubic kilometres of clear sea water. Located in the deepest parts of the Mediterranean, KM3NeT is opening a new window on our Universe including research on the properties of the elusive neutrino particles.
You can find a pdf version of Prof de Wasseige's presentation here and the work of the KN3Net project was recently featured (October 2025) in the EU's Research Magazine Horizon.
The talk took place in the Social Area above the Brel Theatre at the British School of Brussels (BSB), Tervuren and was followed by our usual social networking.
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