Author: Cyril Deicha

The Liechtenstein Scientific Society has commemorated its 25th jubilee, in the newly opened community center of Vaduz. The chosen date was May 16th in order to give to the event an international character related to the UNESCO Day of Light. There were two items on the agenda: The presentation of a book, and a conference about the “Liechtenstein exoplanet”.

The book is a very interesting chronicle of the Scientific Society. It describes the highlights of a quarter century devoted to the popularization of science and networking with museums and scholar associations on local level. On a global level it stresses the developing of relations between learned societies in Europe and all over the world. The book is illustrated with citations of newspapers describing events both global and local: The first exhibition of a moon-rock and the “Spice Bees in Space” projects with the NASA, the 2005 international exhibition about Einstein's travel through Liechtenstein , and for the International Year of Light 2015 the philatelic emissions of stamps which can be used for optical experiments.  At the end of the book there is a short biography of Dr.Cyril Deicha, the founder and honorary president of the Society.

The second item was a public discussion about “our” Exoplanet which is 700 light-years away. Let's remember that three years ago the International Astronomical Union organized a contest to give popular names to some “Exo-Worlds” ( i.e. stars having planets). Every nation could make proposals in his own language. That's how it happened that the the local Liechtenstein dialect was choosen by the IAU to name two celestial bodies: a star was named “Pipoltr” and his planet  "Umbäässa". These are names of tiny insects living in our forests and mountains, a very useful image to represent the proportions in the universe. That was the central theme in this science outreach conference.

“Let's consider an ant, a small insect so tiny that its limbs (a few dozen micrometers thick) are hardly visible without a magnifying glass. Now  try to see the legs of the little animal climbing on a tree. And imagine the tree is atop of one of those mountains rising on the horizon. So difficult was the challenge facing astronomers when discovering the exoplanet Umbäässa at the distance of 700 light-years” That was our input statement for the discussion. Indeed the exoplanet has the same angular diameter as the ant's leg at a distance or over 100 kilometers!