New windows on our Universe

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. 

Extreme phenomena in our universe, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large

On the evening of 29 September 2022 RSC Belgium welcomed back, once again, Professor Vincent Lemaitre from Universite Catholique de Louvain to discuss the latest thinking in high energy and astrophysics in a talk on ‘Key experiments probing extreme phenomena in the universe from very small to very large scale structures’. His talk was our first in-person talk since the COVID pandemic and was hosted at the British School of Brussels. This event was also the prize giving ceremony for our Chemistry Challenge 2022 for school students.

Scientific knowledge is forged through observation of nature and the development of scientific theories. The latter must not only explain observations, but they must also make predictions that can be verified by experiments! By construction, and contrary to beliefs, scientific theories are therefore falsifiable by possible observations not predicted or understood by theories. Present theories are therefore doomed to be replaced by new ones, more complete and more efficient. The key element for the development of new theories is therefore our ability to observe nature in its smallest corners and extreme conditions - at different spatial and temporal scales, and at different levels of structural complexity.

In the talk, Prof Lemaitre took us through three recent experiments in physics that allow us to observe (or reproduce the conditions of) extreme phenomena in our universe, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

They were:

• The CMS experiment at the LHC (Particle Physics and the discovery of the Higgs boson)
• The LIGO/VIRGO experiments (General Relativity and the discovery of gravitational wave), and
• The ICECUBE/KM3NeT experiments (Physics of Astroparticles and the first observation of Blazers – a form of supermassive black hole - with neutrinos).

After presenting the main result(s) obtained by these significant projects, Vincent briefly discussed some future experimental projects in each of these research fields.

The talk was followed by a networking reception where the discussion continued.

We had hoped to combine the live 'in-person' event with a webinar version but a few technical hitches prevented this and we also were unable to record a video version of the event. Our apologies for this.