GravitySirens

Listening to the Universe with gravity

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Category: Outreach

  • GravitySirens at the European Researchers Night 2025

    Every year I participate to the European Research Night in Rome, an international event where for a weekend we organize outreach activities, meet people and discuss with them. This year was particular exciting as it was the first year where I participated together with my group! We animated the nights of Sept 26th and Sept 27th.

    Alberto, Arianna and Alessandro ruled the nights I am sure they inspired many people. Below you can see some of the pics from the nights.

    Arianna helped in presenting the general activities of our institution and she also discussed about the importance of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Alberto managed entrances in the Big Bang Machine, an immersive display of GW170817, the first multi-messenger detection (he was probably the best person given his expertise on the topic!). Alessandro was splitting his time between coloring gravitational waves spectrograms with kids and entertain their parents with a Michelson interferomenter while their kids were busy. Finally, I was busy presenting the project to the people, you can certainly see my happy and relaxed face in the picture.

    Best outcome of the research project so far, coloured spectrograms! I love them.

    P.S. I am kidding we have plenty of amazing science coming.

  • Surfing the GR24/Amaldi16 with the Crew

    Disclaimer, emotional trigger: Six years ago, I attended the GR22/Amaldi 13 as a postdoc, my first year as a postdoc. One of the largest conferences on gravitational waves. At that conference, I delivered 2 talks: my last talk on continuous gravitational waves and my first talk on gravitational waves cosmology.

    This year, I attended the GR24/Amaldi16 as the Principal Investigator of a new group focusing on gravitational wave cosmology. I chaired the Cosmology: Theory and observation session. I did not deliver any talk, but the PhD students and postdocs of my group did! It was a nice occasion to meet with colleagues for a lifetime, but also to discuss with new ones entering the field. It is incredible to witness how science and generations are progressing so quickly. I feel old already!

    Let’s go to the science part now!

    Sarah Ferraiuolo (PhD student) presented how the stochastic gravitational wave background can help to constrain the Hubble parameter, together with resolved sources.

    Leonardo Iampieri (PhD student) presented a new method to estimate the Hubble constant with time delays between gamma-ray bursts and gravitational waves from binary neutron stars.

    Gregoire Pierra (Postdoc) presented tentative evidence for a correlation between the spin magnitude and mass of black holes. Could this be the smoking gun for the presence of black holes formed dynamically in dense star clusters?

    Top Figure: Me delivering my talk on Continuous Gravitational Waves at the GR22/Amaldi13 conference.
    Bottom Figure: Me (in the middle of the picture), with the postdocs and PhD students of the Rome Virgo group. Not all of them are working on gravitational wave cosmology, but everybody is doing great science.