I am the author of a number of outreach articles and texts on Astronomy, some of which were written as part of my internship at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), on EU-funded research projects and as part of my education in science communication, see the Science Communication section. Some samples are available below.
Internship at the European Southern Observatory (ESO)
I have been the primary author of posts for the ESO Blog and ESO Pictures of the Week.
Blog posts:
- The story of our quest for Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Focus: the history of the observations indicating that there’s a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and the technology that was developed to enable such observation. This blog post was published one week before the press conference during which the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first ever image of Sagittarius A* (read this ESO press release to which I have contributed or watch this ESO video explainer, whose script I have co-authored)
- Unfolding the heavens. Focus: how James Webb — the space telescope launched by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency in December 2021 — and ESO’s future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will cooperate to solve the mysteries of the Universe and spark a new era of astronomical discoveries.
- VLTI, your (birth) story goes on! Focus: the 20th anniversary of the first fringes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). For this post I have interviewed Philippe Gitton (optical engineer at ESO) and Markus Schöller (staff astronomer at ESO). This is the second part of a series of two posts on this topic.
- Blow out your twenty candles, VLTI! Focus: the 20th anniversary of the first fringes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). For this post I have interviewed Françoise Delplancke-Ströbele (Executive Officer for the Directorate of Engineering at ESO) and Pierre Kervella (Astronomer at Paris Observatory LESIA and former ESO Staff and Fellow in Chile). This is the first part of a series of two posts on this topic.
- Rescuing the stars. Focus: what the astronomical community is doing to protect the night sky from threats such as light pollution and increasing low-orbit space activity. For this blog post I have interviewed Andrew Williams and Giuliana Rotola, external relations officer and former research intern at ESO respectively.
Pictures of the week:
- A village in the desert?
- Taming the sky
- Sunrise at Cerro Armazones
- When giants meet
- Enviable views
- Bumps in the heavens
- Creator of stars
- It’s a car! It’s a train! No, it’s Jupiter!
- Family tradition
- Fisheye on the galaxy
- Falling from the stars
- A rift in the sky
- A celestial arch illuminates the desert
- A cosmic quartet
I have also been the leading writer of the webpage presenting the CONCERTO instrument on the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) operated by ESO, and one of the leading writers of ESO’s outreach page on interferometry.
Other outreach products on Astronomy
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I wrote the following three articles for the final assignment of a module on online and media writing, offered by the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol, UK) and taught across 10 weeks of online content between April and July 2022 (see the Science Communication Section):
- Astronomers find the first isolated black hole ever observed (news story)
- Asteroids striking the Earth: how likely is that? (feature story)
- Sorry, your zodiac sign is wrong (blog post)
- Una nuova misura per la velocità di espansione dell’Universo (Publication in Italian)
- Publication date: 21 March 2017
- Publisher: Galileo
- Focus: a new measurement of the expansion velocity of the Universe presented by the H0LiCOW Collaboration.
- Observing the invisible collisions of intermediate mass black holes
- Publication date: 9 April 2014
- Publisher: LIGO Scientific Collaboration
- Focus: the search for gravitational waves from intermediate mass black hole binaries I have performed for my PhD thesis (see the Research section). This article is part of the series of outreach summaries on LIGO scientific publications.
Science communication management for EU-funded projects
I have written the following articles as part of the communication and dissemination activity of European research projects I carry out at ICONS (Italy) and at the youris.com European Research Media Center (Belgium), see the Science Communication Section.- Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore coordinates the PROTON project to fight organized crime and terrorism
- Publication date: 17 November 2018
- Publisher: United Nations Academic Impact
- Focus: a non-technical summary of the European research project PROTON. I have written this article as PROTON communication and dissemination leader.
Post-graduate programme in science journalism and communication
I have written the following posts for the blog StoccolmaaRoma as part of the assignments for the Post-graduate programme in science journalism and communication I took at La Sapienza University in Rome (Italy) in the academic year 2016/2017, see the Science Communication Section. The posts are in Italian.- Quando i Nobel si unirono contro l’atomica
- Publication date: 22 May 2017
- Focus: the the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
- Là dove riposano i Nobel
- Publication date: 17 April 2017
- Focus: the cemetery in Göttingen (Germany) where many Nobel Prize winners are buried
- Bertrand Russell, il matematico della pace
- Publication date: 30 January 2017
- Focus: a short biography of Bertrand Russell