Music of the stars

Music of the stars is an incredible journey of discovery through the Cosmos led by award-winning astrophysicist and international handpan artist Dr Edoardo Striani. The ethereal and evocative handpan music blends with extraordinary images of the Universe in a combination of concert, entertainment and educational content. Edoardo will talk about stellar formation and evolution, dimensions of the observed universe, exoplanets, stellar nucleosynthesis and nuclear fusion, focusing on the cycle of birth and death of stars and their role in the creation of the elements that form us and everything that surrounds us. The show is meant to inspire awe and connection to our amazing Universe. Ample space is devoted to questions from the audience at the end.

Edoardo Striani is an astrophysicist, musician and science communicator from Italy. Member of the AGILE team, an Italian telescope for the detection of gamma rays, he graduated in Physics with a thesis on dark matter and obtained his PhD with a thesis on the gamma variability of the Crab Nebula. For the discovery of this variability he was awarded, together with the AGILE team, with the Bruno Rossi prize of the American Astronomical Society, the most prestigious award for high-energy astrophysics. He worked at the INAF-IAPS in Rome in the field of high energy astrophysics and at the Physics department of the University of Turin where he studied the instability of astrophysical plasmas and magnetic reconnection. He is author and co-author of over 50 scientific publications and has been a speaker at conferences in Italy, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, California and Japan. His interests include pulsar wind nebulae, galactic binaries, particle acceleration, astrophysical jets and magnetic reconnection. Already a percussionist since 2010, in 2012 he began playing the Handpan, a percussive and melodic instrument. As a musician, he has played in the most important Handpan festivals in Italy and abroad, and performed his show in several theaters and planetaria in Italy, Russia, Switzerland and Luxembourg.