About my work
I am currently a Fellow of the recently established
Excellence
Cluster "Origin and Structure of the Universe", a joint
investigation by astrophysicists, particle physicists and nuclear
physicists aimed at exploring fundamental questions in cosmology and
astrophysics. Within the Cluster I will be mainly active in the
research are F, devoted to the study of black holes.
Before that, I was a postdoc in the X-ray group of the Max-Planck
Institute for Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE) in Garching, near Munich and
in the neighbouring Max-Planck
Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), as a member of the
high-energy astrophysics group.
I got my PhD in 2001, from the Institute
of Astronomy, at the University of Cambridge,
UK. There I worked in the X-ray
group, under the supervision of Prof. Andy Fabian. My thesis was entitled
"The spectra and variability of accreting black holes". You can read the
summary here. Even earlier, I used to do some astrophysics related work at the International
Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (ICRA)
at the University `La Sapienza' of
Rome, where I got my undergraduate degree in physics
in 1997.
My work focuses on the modeling of the accretion flows around compact
objects, black holes in particular. I tend to work on the theoretical side
of the issue, right where astrophysics meets general
relativity.
The purpose of my work is ultimately to understand the physical properties
of the black holes (we believe) we observe, either in our galaxy
or in the extra galactic space.
Scientific Interests
Black holes are the most amazing and powerful of all astrophysical
objects, and their properties, and those of the accretion flows around
them, are thought to be of paramount importance in different fields of
astronomy: galaxy
formation and evolution; Quasars;Active
Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and Radio
Galaxies; gamma-ray
bursts; X-ray
binaries and even our Galactic
Center.
My research activity focusses on the many aspects of black hole accretion, from the development of theories and interpretation of the high energy processes responsible for the observed emission to theoretical investigations of different modes of accretion. I am also interested in studying the global statistical properties of active black holes in the local universe and their cosmic evolution.
The image on the right, an artist's impression by Sebastian Heinz, shows the black hole - accretion disk - jet systems in galactic nuclei and X-ray binaries. The appearance of the inner regions around the black hole is very similar in both case, an idea that led us to the discovery of the so-called fundamental plane of black hole activity.
I am a member of the COSMOS collaboration, one
of the largest international multi-wavelength surveys ever done,
where I study high redshift AGN,
measuring fundamental properties of their black holes (masses, host
galaxies properties, etc). Also, I am involved in the Surveys Key
Science Programme of the LOFAR
collaboration.
