Christmas Conference: science is a celebration!

While Ana Catarina Monteiro used numbers to perform a magic trick involving 600 people, Rui Agostinho spoke about collisions with asteroids and João Duarte questioned the existence of life on other planets. The three researchers from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Ciências ULisboa) were the protagonists of the 2025 Christmas Conference, which took place last Friday. There was no shortage of musical participation from Vicentuna and a lively Christmas gathering, but well before that, Luís Carriço, Dean of Ciências ULisboa, had revealed one of the reasons for the invitation sent to 10 secondary schools that attended the Conference.

‘We want them to see Ciências ULisboa with affection and to come here to teach and learn things,’ said Luís Carriço, in a public appearance that also marks the end of his term as head of Ciências ULisboa.

Ana Catarina Monteiro, guest lecturer at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, was responsible for opening the ‘festivities’ associated with each of the three 15-minute lectures – always with the providential help of the scientific spirit. The young researcher recalled that mathematics is now used to ensure the confidentiality of communications with encryption techniques, but it was with a little trick involving simple arithmetic operations that she ended up surprising the audience.

After asking everyone to use the calculator on their mobile phones, the researcher ensured one of the most exciting moments of the event by asking each participant to choose a random number and then perform a series of mathematical operations. In the end, the exercise helped to confirm the potential of mathematics as a ‘secret weapon’ and allowed Ana Catarina to guess the number that ended up appearing on each mobile phone screen.

‘I had two specific goals for this lecture: the first was to share the work I have been doing; the second was to demystify mathematics, presenting it in a surprising way that the audience might not have expected,’ says Ana Catarina Monteiro.

It was also with a certain aura of mystery that the Christmas Conference drew the attention of young students to João C. Duarte, geologist and professor in the Department of Earth and Energy Sciences, who questioned whether Earth was really the only planet with life. ‘If there is any form of life on another planet, it will probably be someone from the generation of those secondary school students who will discover it,’ says the researcher, who has a distinguished career in the study of earthquakes and tectonics, and who took advantage of the conference to give free rein to planetary geology. ‘Sometimes it's a bit intimidating, but it's good that these students were able to come here to see that the people at this faculty were once like them,’ adds João C. Duarte.

While part of the scientific community tries to study the best way to reach other planets, Rui Agostinho, retired professor of the Department of Physics and one of the national references in the field of Astronomy, has contributed to the development of solutions that help prevent a possible collision of asteroids with Earth. Although not very encouraging, the scenario is far from statistically impossible, as was seen in 1908 in Siberia, or in 2013 in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia.

After revealing the potential effects of an asteroid collision with Earth, Rui Agostinho catapulted the imagination of the 600 young people to the asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos, which have already recorded a first collision from the DART space mission and are due to be visited at the end of 2026 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) HERA mission.

Today, little or nothing can prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth – but Rui Agostinho pointed out that ESA scientists have been working on a potential solution through the HERA project, which prioritises the collection of descriptive data on the results produced by the collision generated by the DART mission. Rui Agostinho himself joined the HERA team after an invitation from Paulo Gordo, a researcher at Ciências ULisboa and leader of the start-up Synopsis Planet.

“I chose this topic so I could show the audience the various things we can study at our Faculty,” replies Rui Agostinho. “If we look at the development of a rocket, we see that knowledge of chemistry (for propulsion systems) is necessary, but also electronics and many other scientific areas,” he adds.

The effort made in scientific dissemination did not take long to produce results. “Several students asked to take a photo with me. And two of them even asked for my autograph!” says Rui Agostinho. Christmas also has science!