Publishing date: 13 October 2026 Immagine notizia Immagine Paragrafo Once again, the University of Insubria played a leading role at the IAC (International Astronautical Congress), the world’s leading astronautics congress. Following its 2024 edition in Milan, this year’s event took place in Antalya, Türkiye, from 4 to 9 October, with Insubria represented by the InCosmiCon research centre (Intelligence in the Cosmic Context), directed by Professor Paolo Musso of the Department of Human Sciences and Innovation for the Territory (Disuit).In addition to chairing the second session of the congress dedicated to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), entitled SETI and Society: Exploring the Human Dimension, Musso also presented a paper together with physicist and computer scientist Nicolò Antonietti, another member of InCosmiCon. Their presentation attracted considerable interest from the audience.Professor Musso explains: “This year, the entire SETI meeting attracted more interest than usual, and most of the audience consisted of scientists from other disciplines who had come to listen to us. I must admit, however, that our presentation attracted particular attention.The basic idea came from our great friend and mentor Claudio Maccone, Scientific Director of the International Academy of Astronautics and coordinator of InCosmiCon’s research area on Astrobiology and SETI until his death last year.The concept involves exploiting the Sun’s gravitational lensing effect which, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, bends electromagnetic waves coming from objects beyond it. Claudio had mainly developed this idea in relation to radio waves. We, on the other hand, studied its application to visible light, with results that surprised even us.By placing an instrument at the focal point, which we have called the OFI (Optical Focal Interferometer), consisting of two telescopes with a diameter of 10 metres each, separated by 75,000 kilometres, the magnification would be so powerful that we could see objects such as the Egyptian pyramids, New York’s skyscrapers, and even large animals such as whales or dinosaurs on planets up to 1,000 light-years away.And that is only the beginning. In Antalya, a project to build a space telescope one kilometre in diameter was presented. With an OFI of this size, we could observe planets on the other side of the Milky Way in the same way that we view Earth on Google Maps.” Immagine Professor Musso adds: “The potential for the search for life beyond Earth, whether intelligent or not, is clearly enormous. But an instrument of this kind could also revolutionise traditional astronomy, allowing us to observe extremely distant objects in a level of detail that has been unimaginable until now.And this is not science fiction: the technology needed to build it already exists, and in theory we could even start tomorrow. The real challenge lies in operating it, which will have to be almost entirely automated. Since the focal point is a thousand times farther away than the Sun, each command we send would take more than three days to reach its destination.Furthermore, the telescope’s journey to the focal point of the solar gravitational lens will take at least thirty years. I have no hope of seeing it operational in my lifetime, but our students might. And that is why we will continue working on it.”Other papers were presented in the various SETI sessions by InCosmiCon researchers, although not all were affiliated with the University of Insubria. In total, they presented five of the 32 papers, matching the United Kingdom and ranking behind only the United States, with ten. A sixth paper, by Professor Alberto Vianelli, also from Disuit, had been accepted but he was unable to attend the congress for personal reasons.Further information:IAC 2026: https://www.iac2026.org/InCosmiCon Research Centre: https://www.incosmicon.net/ (In the photograph, Professor Paolo Musso presents the design of the Optical Focal Interferometer at the International Astronautical Congress in Antalya)