Personal tools
Log in

Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

INAF

Istituto italiano di astrofisica - national institute for astrophisics

Ciao
You are here: Home INAF News INAF researcher wins a Consolidator Grant 2017

INAF researcher wins a Consolidator Grant 2017

Two black hole systems are the investigational topic of DEMOBLACK: one of the projects that have been granted the European Consolidator Grant, which was submitted by Michela Mapelli, a researcher of the National Institute for Astrophysics-INAF and Professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria

Two black hole systems are the investigational topic of DEMOBLACK: one of the projects that have been granted the European Consolidator Grant, which was submitted by Michela Mapelli, a researcher of the National Institute for Astrophysics-INAF and Professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

DEMOBLACK is one of the 14 Consolidator Grants 2017 that will be hosted in Italy. Michela Mapelli will conduct her research activity at INAF Astronomical Observatory of Padua.

Funded by the European Research Council-ERC with 2 million euro, the project focuses on one of the most mysterious objects in the Universe. Black hole binaries – the existence of which was anticipated, at the theoretical level, at least 30 years ago – were observed for the first time only in 2015 by LIGO interferometers, which detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.

“My DEMOBLACK project aims at answering the crucial question of the formation channels of these systems”, said Mapelli - “Currently we know at least two formation mechanisms: isolated binary evolution and dynamic evolution. In the former, black holes form from the evolution of two twin stars, i.e. two stars from the same cloud of gas which have always lived together, and have sometimes exchanged their masses. In the latter, the two black holes have no ‘relationship’, but they found themselves in the same system due to the effect of a dynamic interaction”, added the researcher.

To discover which channel is the most important, the project will use innovative numeric simulations, by combining the most advanced codes for computer processing.

 

Source: ResearchItaly

Lake Como Schools on Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravitation

Jul 08, 2025

Lake Como Schools on Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravitation It has been held at Como – Villa del Grumello, 23-27 June, the 2025 edition of the “Lake Como Schools on Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravitation” on the theme “Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Cosmological Tensions”

The Lucchin Schools Return

Jun 01, 2025

The Lucchin Schools Return First Edition of the New INAF PhD School Series Concludes in Asiago

MISTRAL, a wind of change in the SRT observations

May 29, 2025

MISTRAL, a wind of change in the SRT observations MISTRAL is a new-generation receiver for observations at millimeter wavelengths, built as part of the recent project to upgrade the Sardinia Radio Telescope for the study of the high-frequency radio universe. The main features of this instrument are the very high number of detectors cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero and a dedicated cold optical system, which allow for extremely sharp images. MISTRAL made its “first light” by observing three different celestial objects: the Orion Nebula, the radio lobes of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, and the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. These images represent the first scientific observations at 90 GHz ever obtained using the SRT