Lectures / 02/09/2009 7:30 pm

Gravitation: Driver of Cosmic Evolution – Stimulus of Research

Even 400 years after Kepler's “Astronomia Nova” gravity is still of outstanding importance for many research areas, including astronomy. In two short talks, we propose to introduce cutting-edge topics of gravity research. We will be covering largest scales (e.g. cosmological structure formation) as well as – astronomically speaking – small scales, such as planetary systems. We will demonstrate a variety of links between research on gravitation and such fields as chaos theory, Dark Matter research, high-performance computing and GPS. We want especially to highlight the great importance of understanding gravitational processes for modern research.