April 25, 2025
We’re back to predicting the excitation amplitude of black hole merger ringdowns. We already looked into the simpler case of binaries with aligned spins, and now tried to study the full problem of binaries with misaligned (i.e. processing) spins. Well, … Continue reading
April 18, 2025
The 2017 paper “Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers?” that I wrote with Emanuele Berti was selected 2025 Frontiers of Science Award. These prizes are awarded by the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), sponsored by the City … Continue reading
April 15, 2025
Great paper led by our former MSc student Alessandro today! This is about combining the distributions of gravitational waves and galaxies to do cosmology. These two probes measure different things (distance and redshift, respectively), so their distributions will “match” only … Continue reading
March 31, 2025
Four BSc+MSc students just graduated with projects in our group! … congrats all!
March 24, 2025
If you’re looking for a PhD in gravitational-wave physics, our 2025 call for PhD scholarships is now available. The procedure is described here (Session 1): https://en.unimib.it/study/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/applying-doctorate/calls-application The deadline is April 24th at noon CEST. For instructions, start from the file … Continue reading
March 10, 2025
Happy to share this postdoc opportunity from the Cariplo Foundation, which is a private trust that operates in the Milan area. It’s an independent fellowship for early career researchers, with a duration of 3 years and a total budget of … Continue reading
March 3, 2025
I’m on the hook for teaching this semester (can’t complain really with such fun classes!). I’m down for “Astrostatistics and Machine Learning” for our MSc degree in Astrophysics and “Machine Learning for Physics and Astronomy” for our BSc degree in … Continue reading
February 28, 2025
The Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitation (SIGRAV) announces the 26th SIGRAV Conference, hosted by the University of Milano-Bicocca, to be held in Milan, Italy, from September 8-12, 2025. https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/sigrav2025 The conference will cover various aspects of classical and … Continue reading
February 18, 2025
When inferring black holes from gravitational-wave data, we tend to do two things, one after the other. First, we consider each event individually and measure its parameters (masses, spins, etc). Then we consider all the events together and measure the … Continue reading
February 18, 2025
Long gravitational-was signals are, well, long. And long often means painful, as more data need to be stored and processed. Kind of intuitively, the solution might be that of cutting things into chunks, so that long becomes short. Here we … Continue reading
February 13, 2025
General relativity has this beautiful property that coordinates are meaningless. You can change them at will, which means they don’t contain any physics. And, believe it or not, some of the popular formulations we use to write down the dynamics … Continue reading
February 5, 2025
We’re going to have quite a few visitors in the next few months. They will be giving amazing seminars, with lots of research ideas floating around: Stephen Green from Nottingham, Cecilia Sgalletta from Trieste, Francisco Duque from the AEI, Angela … Continue reading
February 3, 2025
Quasar 3C 186 strikes back! Matteo and I got interested in this funny quasar last year (see this one). When our paper hit the arxiv, we got contacted by the real astronomers who take actual data, who told us they … Continue reading
January 31, 2025
Gravitational-wave population people talk all the time about parametric vs non-parametric methods. Parametric methods mean imposing our astrophysical knowledge on how we look at GW data. This is great, we do want to extract astrophysical knowledge, but what if we … Continue reading
January 27, 2025
I’m so so proud to see my PhD student Viola De Renzis defending her PhD thesis today. Viola’s thesis is titled “Gravitational-wave astronomy at the crossroads: from current to future detectors, from single events to populations” and was examined by … Continue reading
January 5, 2025
Congrats to Alex Toubiana, postdoc with us, who was just awarded an independent fellowship from the Italian Research Ministry. The scheme is called Young Researcher 2024 and will fund Alex and his research for 3 years.
December 20, 2024
In 2024…. We welcomed Tristan, Chiara, Caroline, Rodrigo, Alex, Federico, and Zachos (group accretion at the Eddington limit). Michele started a faculty in Marseille, Daria graduated, Viola almost graduated and is fighting the paperwork in Marseille, Giulia went to Cambridge, … Continue reading
December 15, 2024
FIS (“Fondo Italiano per la Scienza”) is an Italian grant opportunity which is conceptually similar to the ERC. The amount of these grants is >= 1M EUR and grant holders are offered a tenure-track or tenured position. The deadline for … Continue reading
November 18, 2024
This semester I’m back teaching my “Scientific computing with Python” module to PhD students. It’s a really really fun class to teach (and it’s just 8 lectures, short and sweet!). If you’re curious: github.com/dgerosa/scientificcomputing_bicocca_2024
November 4, 2024
Black holes on eccentric orbits… what does it even mean? The hard (but fun) thing is that we work in General Relativity, where coordinates don’t have a physics inside. One can always change the coordinates as they want, so they … Continue reading
October 24, 2024
Our “popfisher” paper is finally out! (and now Viola can submit her PhD thesis). This is about next-generation (aka 3G) gravitational wave detectors. Those beasts will measure millions of black holes… and with so many of them who cares about … Continue reading
October 24, 2024
Four BSc students and one MSc student defended their research project with us this month. Thanks all for spending some time in our research group!
October 21, 2024
Huge congrats to Arianna Renzini and Nick Loutrel who won two of this year’s “Giovani Talenti” (Young Talents) prizes from the University of Milano-Bicocca. These are internal grants for postdocs: there were four grants awarded in Physics in total and two of … Continue reading
October 15, 2024
LISA will see a gazillion white dwarfs, but we won’t, or at least not individually. Those signals will actually pile up together in a mashed potato thing called foreground. But this mashed potato won’t be smooth (translate: the gravitational-wave signal … Continue reading
October 8, 2024
Our group is accreting people at the Eddington rate! There are 5 new postdocs and 2 PhD students who have just started or are about to start: Group meetings are funny and busy these days, with too many ideas going … Continue reading
September 26, 2024
This is a fun IMBH story we worked out when Kostas and Luca were visiting last summer from JHU. What if (one day, who knows) we observe a highly spinning intermediate-mass black hole? If that happens, is going to be … Continue reading
September 23, 2024
To Stars or to gas, that is the question.Whether ’tis nobler in the hardening to sufferThe slings and arrows of passing stars,Or to dissipate against a sea of gasAnd by disk end them. To inspiral — to merge,No more; and … Continue reading
September 20, 2024
Four students just graduated with projects in our group… First, huge congrats to Cecilia Fabbri who got her MSc in Astrophysics. Cecilia (you might remember her) worked on an exciting applied statistics problem (which has already ended up in a … Continue reading
September 13, 2024
All right I think this is great (but it took me a long time to convince myself and the others that’s the case!) In gravitational-wave astronomy we measure binaries, that is, pairs of two objects. Our signals have information about … Continue reading
August 9, 2024
The ringdown is the final bit of a gravitational-wave signal, after the two black holes have merged. It’s nice because it’s clean; GR is so powerful that all that comes out after a black hole merger has specific frequencies, the … Continue reading
July 22, 2024
Usually my students graduate in Physics, but not this time… Together with Matteo Boschini, I had the pleasure of supervising a student majoring in Computer Science. Alessandro Crespi got his BSc degree with a project on Simulation Design, which is … Continue reading
July 16, 2024
We’re having a few visitors this summer, with lots of science going around. Welcome Jam Sadiq from SISSA (Italy), Rossella Gamba from Berkeley (USA), Abhishek Chowdhuri from IIT Gandhinagar (India), Luca Reali from JHU (USA), and Kostas Kritos also from … Continue reading
May 27, 2024
The orbits of binary black holes could be eccentric, but in practice they’re not. At least when we observe them, and that’s because of a relativistic effect that circularizes the orbit. Even if astrophysics formed black holes eccentric, relativity makes … Continue reading
April 29, 2024
… and we’re back to selection effects. That means modeling what you cannot see. The black holes that gravitational-wave detectors observe are not representative of those that are out there in the Universe. Some are easier to see, some are … Continue reading
April 18, 2024
This week we’re hosting researchers from the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) for a joint mini-conference / workshop / group meeting. More here: davidegerosa.com/lautaro This is part of a PRIN grant we have together (thanks Italy) with support from other … Continue reading
April 16, 2024
Population 3 stars are like “the original” stars. Those formed with material that comes straight from the Big Bang. It would be very (like, a lot!) cool to see them with gravitational-wave detectors. But can we tell them apart? Or … Continue reading
April 12, 2024
The University of Milano-Bicocca welcomes applications for PhD scholarships. This year’s application deadline is May 14th, 2024 (noon CEST) for positions starting in the Fall of 2024: https://en.unimib.it/education/postgraduates/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/applying-doctorate/calls-application In particular, we are looking for highly motivated candidates to join our … Continue reading
March 23, 2024
Three more students graduated in March with research projects completed in our group!
March 6, 2024
On top of “astrostats” for the MSc degree in Astrophysics, this semester I’m excited to start teaching for the new BSc degree in Artificial Intelligence. This course is delivered jointly by the University of Milano-Bicocca (my place), the University of … Continue reading
March 6, 2024
The teaching semester is back and I’ll be delivering my “Astrostatistics and Machine Learning” class once more. This is designed for our MSc program in Astrophysics. Astro-data freaks, go here! github.com/dgerosa/astrostatistics_bicocca_2024
March 4, 2024
And the second paper on the arxiv today is Daria’s masterpiece! pAGN (which Daria says you should read “pagan”) is a brand new, super cool code that implements the hydrodynamics of AGN disks, at least in their most popular one-dimensional … Continue reading
March 4, 2024
This is the first of two papers on the arxiv today: it’s fun when two long, very different projects by different people just happen to be done on the same day! This paper is by my former colleague Nate Steinle … Continue reading
February 28, 2024
Our student Lisa Merlo defended her BSc 3rd year project today! Lisa worked with Pippa Cole and me on computing rates for mergers of primordial black holes, also considering a new detector prototype that the experimental group here is developing … Continue reading
February 21, 2024
Huge huge congrats to Zacharias Roupas who was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship with us! Zachos is currently based at the British University in Egypt and will be joining my group in Milan in the Fall of 2024. The Marie … Continue reading
February 16, 2024
Not sure what happened here, how the hell did I end up writing a paper with actual radio data that needed to be reduced… Call me an ambulance. The guy here is 3C186 which is not a postcode but a … Continue reading
January 23, 2024
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy) will be opening a tenured professorship in astrophysics, with a focus on gravitational-wave data analysis and exploitation. With this notice, we invite expressions of interest from potential candidates. Milano-Bicocca hosts a large group in … Continue reading
December 31, 2023
Much like Spotify, here is our group “Wrapped”, 2023 edition! Some of the group highlights include… We welcomed Pippa, Nick, Arianna, Sshorab, and Matteo. We said bye to Matt who moved to MIT and Nate who moved to Canada, while Daria … Continue reading
November 22, 2023
In the gravitational-wave world, we usually say a binary merger is detected if it has a sufficiently large SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). But is that true? Detection pipelines are far more complicated than that. Here we try to figure out a … Continue reading
November 21, 2023
I’m teaching the first lecture of a new class today. This is “Scientific computing with Python,” a 16h module for PhD students. To the (many) PhD students who signed up: thanks for your interest, hope you’ll like this. BTW the … Continue reading
November 20, 2023
We had another graduation session in November, and a whopping 4 people graduated with research projects in our group. Here are the new BSc physicists who just defended: Congrats all (and twice congrats to Marco and Serena, who graduated with … Continue reading