Andrea
Merloni. Scientific page (always out of date)
About my work
I am currently staff member of the High Energy Group of the Max-Planck
Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany. My main
scientific activities revolve around the managment and scientific
exploitation of eROSITA, an X-ray telescope that surveys the entire sky
onboard the Russian-German mission SRG, launched into space in
2019. I am also leading various spectroscopic programs to
complement the eROSITA survey with SDSS-V and 4MOST
Before joining MPE I was Fellow of the 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.
Before that, I was a postdoc in the neighbouring Max-Planck Institute for
Astrophysics (MPA), as a member
of the high-energy astrophysics group. I got my PhD in 2002, 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 observation and modeling of the accretion flows around compact
objects, black holes in particular.
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 (Univ. of
Wisconsin), 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 also 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.
