September 17, 2023
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for postdoctoral positions in gravitational-wave astronomy. Successful candidates will join the group of Prof. Davide Gerosa and will be part of the “GWmining” project funded by the European Research Council, with … Continue reading
August 28, 2023
Gravitational-wave data keep on giving us surprises. The most outstanding one IMO is an observed correlation between mass ratios and spins of the black holes, which was first found by Tom Callister and friends. That is so, so weird… to … Continue reading
July 19, 2023
Two students just completed their Bachelor’s degree with research projects in our group. Leonardo Toti worked with myself and Giulia Fumagalli on exploring black-hole merger trees in dense clusters, while Simone Restuccia worked with Costantino Pacilio on applying dimensionality-reduction techniques … Continue reading
July 17, 2023
Last week my group and I hosted the international workshop “Gravitational-wave populations: what’s next?.” It’s been a blast! An unconventional conference, with almost zero talks and the vast majority of the time dedicated to discussions. I report the program here … Continue reading
July 10, 2023
New paper from a new student! Here is Matteo Boschini’s first piece of work, where we look at predictions for the final mass and spins of black-hole remnants. That is, after two black hole merge, what’s the mass and spin … Continue reading
June 21, 2023
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy) will be hiring a PhD student under the Italian National PhD program in Space Science and Technology. Candidates with interests in gravitational-wave astronomy, data analysis, and multi-messenger applications are encouraged to apply. For information … Continue reading
June 19, 2023
The advanced class “Big data within science and industry” will take place on September 22nd at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy). https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/bigdatamasterclass Data are everywhere. Exploring scientific data is now at the heart of both scientific advances as well as industrial applications. This one-day … Continue reading
June 7, 2023
All right, this is kind of far from my day-to-day topics but working on this paper with Alice and Riccardo was super fun. Think LISA and supermassive binary black holes. And… the detector does what it wants. That’s not true … Continue reading
June 6, 2023
Happy to report we got a grant from the Italian PRIN program! This is in collaboration with Andrea Maselli from GSSI in L’Aquila. The title is “Gravitational-wave astronomy as a mature field: characterizing selection biases and environmental effects”. Stay tuned … Continue reading
June 3, 2023
Welcome Harrison Blake! My group is hosting a student from the IREU program in Gravitational Physics, which is administered by the University of Florida. Harrison is visiting from Ohio State University and will be working with Michele Mancarella on forecasting … Continue reading
May 30, 2023
We do population analysis in gravitational waves all the time now. That is: we compare many observations from GW experiments against many simulated datapoints from simulations. But what if you only have one observation? That could be a LIGO guy … Continue reading
May 17, 2023
We’ve got the best name ever for a numerical code! Let me introduce QLUSTER which, guess what, simulates clusters. We finally put out a piece of code that was originally developed in 2019 and later used in several papers. It’s … Continue reading
April 27, 2023
This paper is episode four in the up-down instability series. We first figured out the instability exists (episode 1), then computed when binaries go after the instability (i.e. the endpoint, episode 2), and also checked binaries are really unstable in … Continue reading
April 12, 2023
It’s out! The notorious (ask my students…) “precession v2” paper is finally out! This took a veeeery long time; we checked and the first commit for this paper is from May 2020 (!). But the result is an exhilarating tour … Continue reading
March 29, 2023
Third-generation gravitational wave detectors are going to see all stellar-mass black-hole mergers in the Universe. Wooooooooo. But hang on, is this enough? Observing the sources is great, but then we need to measure them. Here we try to focus on … Continue reading
March 23, 2023
The University of Milano-Bicocca welcomes applications for PhD scholarships. The application deadline is April 19th, 2023 for positions starting in the Fall of 2023: https://en.unimib.it/education/postgraduates/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/applying-doctorate/calls-application In particular, the theoretical astrophysics group is looking for highly motivated candidates to join our … Continue reading
March 22, 2023
It’s student time! Massive congratulations to two of my students who just graduated. The star of the day is Matteo Boschini, who completed his MSc project with me after a long visit at the AEI (Postdam, Germany) to collaborate with … Continue reading
February 28, 2023
I’m about to start teaching this year’s edition of “Astrostatistics and Machine Learning” for the MSc degree in Astrophysics here at Milano-Bicocca. The material is available at github.com/dgerosa/astrostatistics_bicocca_2023 Feel free to have a look if you fancy some stats… and … Continue reading
February 27, 2023
The student reps of our department (codename: redshift) have organized a stellar event today. Curiosity and interest in the LISA space mission brought them to design a full day of talks from leading experts in the field. They put Stefano … Continue reading
January 12, 2023
It is a pleasure to announce the workshop “Gravitational-wave populations: what’s next?” which we are currently organizing for next summer: https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/gwpopnext As the catalog of detected gravitational-wave events grows from O(10) to O(100) sources (but think millions in a few … Continue reading
January 1, 2023
Welcome to 2023… and what better way to start the new year than welcoming a new friend! Alice Spadaro (who has recently graduated with an MSc degree here in Milan) is now officially starting her PhD in my group. Alice … Continue reading
November 21, 2022
Huge congrats to two of my students who graduated today! Matteo Muriano completed a funny BSc project on black-hole merger trees. And Giovanni Cavallotto went all in for his MSc research: he basically “fixed” black-hole binary spin precession at 2PN! … Continue reading
November 15, 2022
We want more! With gravitational-wave data, some quantities like the masses of the black holes are much easier to see than others. But those others are very interesting, notably spins that process and orbits that are eccentric, because they would … Continue reading
November 2, 2022
Together with my postdoc Nate, we’re proceeding our investigations on supermassive, spinning binary black holes surrounded by accretion disks (that is: a ton of gas around big monsters at the center of galaxies!). In today’s paper, we dig a bit … Continue reading
October 25, 2022
More graduations today! I had the pleasure to see three of my students defending their scientific work. Lorenzo Zanga completed his BSc project on unstable spinning black-hole binaries, Alessandro Carzaniga defended his MSc thesis on gaussianities in the LISA detector, … Continue reading
October 13, 2022
My group is hosting quite a few visitors this semester. We’re alive!
October 12, 2022
So many new people are joining us this Fall! Michele Mancarella is joining us as a postdoc supported by my ERC grant. He’s moving from Geneva (Switzerland) brings with him some new activities on gravitational-wave cosmology, because astronomy was not … Continue reading
September 29, 2022
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for postdoctoral positions in gravitational-wave astronomy. Successful candidates will join the group of Prof. Davide Gerosa and will be part of the “GWmining” project funded by the European Research Council. Targeted … Continue reading
September 21, 2022
Wooo! What an amazing performance by two of my students today, who defended their BSc and MSc degrees! Oliver Rossi discussed his BSc project on black holes with large spins completed in collaboration with Viola De Renzis (PhD student in … Continue reading
September 19, 2022
The Italian government has pushed a hiring program dedicated to holders and applicants of Marie Curie Fellowships from the EU. The call targets those that have either (i) completed a successful Marie Curie Fellowship in the past 4 years or … Continue reading
August 30, 2022
The Italian government is pushing a major inverstment program in High-Performance Computing, and we’re part of it! The new ICSC (Italian Center for Supercomputing) will manage >300M Euros going towards early-career researchers, PhD scholarships, and computing infrastructure. The University of … Continue reading
July 4, 2022
Lots of “firsts” today! My first-year PhD student Viola just put out her first first-author paper. This is about measuring black holes with not one, but two precessing spins. People have been trying to figure out how to tell if … Continue reading
June 3, 2022
Very happy to report that Arianna Renzini (currently a postdoc at Caltech) was awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Union, to be hosted here with my group. Arianna will bring expertise in modeling the gravitational-wave stochastic background, … Continue reading
June 1, 2022
We’re having four (!) summer students joining the group this year! Diego Padilla Monroy from Florida International University (Miami) will be working with me in Milan supported by the IREU program. Derin Sivrioglu from Grinnell College (Iowa) will be working … Continue reading
May 25, 2022
Big stars burn everything they have, die fast, and produce big black holes. So when you see two black holes together, it’s likely that the big black hole comes from the big star. Or maybe not? Before dying, the big … Continue reading
May 4, 2022
Another short post today, but it’s not just astrophysics that will be awesome with LISA, but fundamental physics too! Here is the white paper of the relevant LISA working group. Get ready to test your wildest ideas, my theory friend! … Continue reading
April 26, 2022
The University of Milano-Bicocca welcomes applications for Ph.D. scholarships. The application deadline is May 20th, 2022 for positions starting in the Fall of 2022: https://en.unimib.it/education/postgraduates/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/applying-doctorate/calls-application In particular, the theoretical astrophysics group is looking for strong, highly motivated candidates to join … Continue reading
April 22, 2022
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for a 3+2 year research position in HPC applications to astrophysics. The astrophysics group at Milano-Bicocca provides a vibrant environment with expertise covering all aspects of gravitational-wave astronomy, relativistic astrophysics, galactic … Continue reading
April 21, 2022
I was just awarded a large allocation on the Italian national supercomputer at CINECA. My PhD student Viola De Renzis (our parameter-estimation expert!) is the co-I on our proposal. Our award is part of the so-called ISCRA Class B program … Continue reading
April 8, 2022
Observing gravitational waves from the ground (i.e. LIGO, Virgo, etc) give us a unique view on “the last three minutes” of the life of compact objects before they merge with each other. Going to space (I’m talking to you, LISA!) … Continue reading
April 4, 2022
Daria’s new paper is out! (With key contributions from others in the group… This is also Viola’s first paper!). Here we look at sub-dominant black-hole spin effects in current data from LIGO and Virgo (yeah sorry guys… our black-hole spin … Continue reading
March 11, 2022
LISA astrophysics is awesome and everything you might ever want to know is written this paper. [Sorry for the short blog post, but there isn’t much else to say really…] A huge thanks to all the captains that put this … Continue reading
March 9, 2022
It took a while (so many technical challenges…) but we made it! Matt‘s monster paper is finally out! Let me introduce a fully-fledged pipeline to study populations of gravitational-wave events with deep learning. If it sounds cool, well, it is … Continue reading
March 2, 2022
I just had the first lectures of a class I’m teaching for the first time: Astrostatistics and Machine Learning (sounds exciting? Well, it is!). This is an advanced course for the MSc degree in Astrophysics and Space Science at the … Continue reading
February 23, 2022
Huge congrats to my student Cecilia Fabbri who got her Bachelor’s degree today. Cecilia defended (quite brilliantly!) her project titled “Constraining the black-hole irreducible mass with current gravitational-wave data”. Her work ended up in our recent draft (arxiv:2202.08848). Cecilia is … Continue reading
February 21, 2022
Spinning black holes are weird (well, all black holes are weird but those that spin are the worse!). They have a funny thing called ergoregion where orbiting particles can have negative energy. Penrose was the first to realize that this … Continue reading
January 20, 2022
Traveling is (kind of) coming back, and we’re having lots of visitors around, all supported by external research grants (congrats folks, you’re great!) Daria Gangardt is visiting Milan from Birmingham for 6 months from January to July, supported by a … Continue reading
January 7, 2022
I’m very happy to share that I was awarded a 330k EUR grant from the Cariplo Foundation. Cariplo is a trust that supports scientific research in the Lombardy region of Italy. Our proposal is titled “Deep into the relativistic two-body … Continue reading
December 6, 2021
My group and I are now part of TEONGRAV, which is the Italian national initiative dedicated to gravitational theory and phenomenology. TEONGRAV is run by the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) and, besides the other folks here in Milan, … Continue reading
November 17, 2021
Breaking things is fun! In the previous paper of this series, we looked at accretion disks around massive black-hole binaries and found things were going awry. We kept on finding configurations that our implementation could not handle… And now we … Continue reading