Tommaso Marchetti

I'm Tommaso Marchetti, a research fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany. My main research involves hypervelocity stars: stars with such a high velocity that they are not gravitationally bound to our Galaxy, the Milky Way, but they are flying away from it. These stars are amongst the fastest objects in the Universe! Find more about hypervelocity stars here.

I graduated from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in September 2015 with a Master of Science Degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics. For my thesis I worked with Prof. Paolo de Bernardis on the optimization of optical components for LSPE, a stratospheric balloon-borne experiment aimed at measuring the B-modes of CMB polarization.

In October 2015 I started my PhD at Leiden Observatory, in the Netherlands, under the supervision of Dr. Elena Maria Rossi. The goal of my PhD was to find hypervelocity stars in the Gaia catalogue. I defended my PhD in October 2019, with a thesis entitled "Hunting for the Fastest Stars in the Milky Way".

In my free time I like reading and travelling, and one of my main interest is music. I play the bass guitar, and recently I have started playing saxophone and synths. I spend a lot of my time listening to records, here you can find my favourite albums per year.