PEOPLE
THE PHYSICS OF GRAVITATIONAL SIGNALS AMONGST THE L'ORÉAL-UNESCO 2021 AWARDS
Interview with Ornella Juliana Piccinni, INFN researcher at the Amaldi Research Centre of the Sapienza University of Rome and member of the Virgo collaboration, winner of the L'Oreal-Unesco 2021 prize “Per le Donne e la Scienza” (For Women and Science)
Although the field of research dedicated to the study of gravitational waves is already preparing to launch a new season with even more powerful detectors, it continues to produce fundamental results, such as the one published in June by the Virgo, LIGO and KAGRA collaborations, dealing with the observation of the first signals generated by two mixed binary systems comprising a black hole and a neutron star. The work carried out by the many female scientists in this area of research is essential and indispensable for the achievement of such successes. This year they are in the spotlight of “Per le Donne e la Scienza” Italia, an international prize promoted by the L'Oréal foundation in collaboration with UNESCO, which since 2002 has aimed to raise public awareness of the problem of gender inequality in science, thus enhancing and supporting the work of young female researchers in the field of STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and encouraging new generations of women to embark on a scientific career. One of the six grants awarded in the 2021 edition of the prize went to Ornella Juliana Piccinni, a researcher at INFN Rome 1 division, at the Amaldi Research Centre of the Università Sapienza in Roma and a member of the Virgo collaboration, thanks to a project aimed at modelling and identifying the gravitational signals produced by magnetars, neutron stars with an extremely intense magnetic field.
How are the research projects of the L'Oréal prize selected and what kind of prize do the winners receive?
Since 2002, L'Oréal Italia, in collaboration with the UNESCO commission, has annually selected the six most interesting research projects proposed by women under 35, in the field of life sciences, physical sciences and sciences relating to matter, including engineering and technological sciences. The “L'Oréal ...NEWS
RESEARCH
EHT: A LOOK INTO THE HEART OF THE CENTAURUS A GALAXY
An international team of scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has combined observations from several radio telescopes around the world, using the same technique that produced the famous image of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy, to photograph the heart of the nearby Centaurus A radio galaxy in unprecedented detail at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. The team, including ...
SPACE
FERMI-LAT PROVIDES THE FIRST MAP OF EXTRAGALACTIC TRANSIENT SOURCES
The first list of extragalactic transient sources has been obtained. These sources correspond to a particular class of extreme astrophysical objects characterised by a non-continuous and variable emission of gamma rays, i.e., photons at high energies. The results, published in early September in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement, are the fruit of a study led by Italian researchers from INFN and ASI Italian National Space Agency, as part of the international Large Area Telescope (LAT) collaboration. One of the two detectors ...
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES AT THE VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE
Gravitational waves and large research infrastructures that serve to host the instruments for their observation, such as the future Einstein Telescope project, are among the protagonists of the cultural proposal of the ...
FOCUS
EUPRAXIA: PLASMA ACCELERATION AMONG NEXT EUROPEAN RESEARCH CHALLENGES
EuPRAXIA is a future multidisciplinary experimental research infrastructure based on the use of plasma acceleration - an innovative particle acceleration technique - and intended for basic research and applications in physics and other scientific sectors. It is one of the two international projects, with the Einstein telescope, which the INFN, and Italy, with the MUR Ministry of Universities and Research, has successfully nominated for the 2021 Roadmap of the ESFRI European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure, the European strategic forum that identifies the future major research infrastructures in which to invest at the European level. One of the main challenges for future accelerators is to achieve increasingly higher energies in order to explore new realms of matter. As stated in the Conceptual Design Report, ...
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