Ciao! I'm Silvia Martocchia.
My story
Ciao! My name is Silvia, I'm italian and I'm an astrophysicist.
When I was little, my parents gave me a big atlas book about Astronomy (it was bigger than me!) and since then I dream of understanding the history of our Universe.
I have done my University studies in Rome, at University of "La Sapienza". Here I became interested in sources called "Active Galactic Nuclei" (AGN), which are supermassive black holes found in the centre of galaxies. Such black holes are really monsters, some of them can have a mass up to a billion times the mass of our Sun. M87*, in the figure below, was recently imaged for the first time with an impressive technique combining several telescopes thousands of km apart. My Master thesis, at the time, focused on investigating how these monsters could affect the evolution of the galaxies in which they reside.
The first image of a black hole, M87* in the centre of the M87 galaxy. Figure Credits: EHT Collaboration
For my PhD, I moved to the UK, in Liverpool, the city of the Beatles! Here I spent two years and I completely shifted my science. I started studying smaller objects than AGN, but not less interesting. These are called "globular clusters" and you can see one (47 Tucanae, in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way) in the image on the right side. Globular clusters are agglomerate of hundreds of thousands of stars that are gravitationally bound. They are among the most ancient objects found in the Universe, as their ages approach the age of the Universe itself (~13 billion years). They are ubiquitous in any galaxy that is massive enough, in a number that is usually larger as galaxies are more massive.
Their stellar populations, meaning the "families of stars" that are found within globular clusters, have a complex, unexpected chemistry that fascinated me. Understanding how clusters and their stars form is crucial to advance in many branches of Astronomy, from the evolution of stars up to the formation of galaxies. This is what I have been studying in the past few years (see Research If you want to know more).
47 Tucanae. Credits: ESA/NASA/HST.
Credits: Silvia Martocchia.
I have performed my research in many places around Europe, and I found this a very enriching experience, from both a professional and personal point-of-view.
Two years of my PhD were spent at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany. The figure on the top is a photo that I have taken at the ESO Very Large Telescope at in Chile, Cerro Paranal, one of the biggest optical telescopes in the world.
Finally, I spent my first postdoc at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, while now I am currently a Gliese fellow at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, where I spend time also teaching Bachelor and Master students in Physics and Astronomy.