Violette Impellizzeri

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Violette Impellizzeri
Violette Impellizzeri in the Chilean Senate.jpg
Violette Impellizzeri receiving award by the Chilean Senate
Born15 August 1977
Palermo, Italy
NationalityItalian
Alma materUniversity of Bristol
Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie
OccupationAstronomer, astrophysicist and university teacher

Violette Impellizzeri (born on 15 August 1977 in Palermo), is an Italian astronomer, astrophysicist and university teacher.

Biography[]

She lived three or four years in Saronno in the Province of Varese, then she moved with her family to Alcamo (Sicily), where she grew up and attended the primary school and secondary school; then she moved with her family to Karlsruhe, in Germany, where her father had started teaching.

She completed her studies at the European School of Karlsruhe, where she earned her European baccalaureate. In 1995 she entered the University of Bristol; while attending the Faculty of Physics, she realized that she had an aptitude for astrophysics, so she went back to Germany to obtain a masters in Physics and got a doctorate in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie in Bonn. She continued her studies by attending a post-doctorate in Charlottesville, in Virginia (United States),[1] at the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory), where she worked for three years in the project of Physical cosmology about megamaser (MCP).

In 2011 Impellizzeri started working with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile; every month, and for several years, Violette had to reach the desert of Atacama and make observations together with a team of astronomers and astrophysicists by means of the greatest Radio telescope in the world,[2] made up of 66 antennas, which can observe the most remote angles of the universe with a very high resolution. She started working there as an astronomer experienced with operations of ALMA and assumed several roles until 2020. The project's financing came from the United States, Europe and Japan.

In October 2020 she moved back to Europe and started working, as a program manager, with Allegro (ALMA Local Expertise GROup), the European ALMA Regional Center (ARC) node in the Netherlands which is hosted by Leiden Observatory. She is also a teacher at Leiden University. Established together with the (NOVA), and the Physical Sciences division of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO/EW), Allegro integrates the expertise relevant to ALMA within the astronomical institutions and universities in the Netherlands.[3]

Activity[]

During Impellizzeri's work on Active Galactic Nuclei, as a part of her doctorate at Bonn University, she projected a series of observations with the scope of detecting water masers (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in distant galaxies. The project was carried on by using the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope, a very large moving steel structure that orientates with extraordinary submillimetre precision.

The research was successful because the water maser was detected with the first attempt and the discovery has been confirmed by the Very Large Array Radio Telescope of the New Mexico (NRAO). Besides, the Electromagnetic wave of maser found a random and fortuitous alignment with a body of large mass (a massive galaxy) which behaved like a gravitational lens, enabling the focalization and magnification of the signal (and then making it visible). By considering the speed of light, she discovered that these water molecules had been produced eleven billion years before. This discovery was published in the journal Nature[2] and was reported in the international press.

The discovery has relevance for the studies on the theories of the expansion of the universe, and especially, on the calculation of the Hubble constant which measures the relationship between distance and speed of celestial bodies (galaxies). In 2008 Impellizzeri was recruited by the NRAO to work on the cosmology project of MCP (Megamaser Cosmology Project) and she was entrusted with the coordination of the research conducted with the Green Bank Telescope in Virginia, and of the observations made with the VLBI (Very Long Baseline Observatory). She worked intensively for the MCP project during the three years spent in Virginia, but remained as a collaborator in the project over the ensuing ten years.

Meanwhile, the U.S.A., Europe and Japan were going to build the largest radiotelescope in the world in Chile, in the Atacama desert at an altitude of five thousand meters. Impellizzeri was sent to work by NRAO as an astronomer for the realization of this ambitious project. From the beginning, she was charged with the integration of the VLBI observations within ALMA (under the title of friend of VLBI),[4] in order to be able to make observations with other telescopes over the world, even distant 10,000 kilometers between them,[5] as if it were only one with a diameter of 10,000 km. In nearly 10 years of observations at ALMA, they have made discoveries and verified many theories.

In 2017 they started the observations with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) hoping to realize the first image of a Black hole. By then, black holes had only been a theory, big masses with an enormous gravitational force devouring everything approaching them and from which nothing escaped, not even light. Nobody, however, could prove their existence, unless indirectly (see about Andrea Ghez the Nobel prize in 2020, and others) until they published the first photo.

It took years of preparation and a great technical effort to put together all the radiotelescopes in the world, which took the photo, published on 10 April 2019, at the same moment. The telescopes contributing to this result were Alma, Apex, the 30 meters IRAM of Grenoble, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Alfonso Serrano telescope, the Submillimeter Array telescope, the Submillimeter Telescope and the South Pole Telescope.[5] They chose the black hole in the center of the galaxy Messier 87 at a distance of 56 million lightyears; this black hole has got a mass of 6.5 billion solar masses.[4]

Honors[]

  • Earned the title of Woman of Stars and a publication on Nature (journal) for the discovery of the most ancient water in the universe;
  • 11 August 2018: Assigned the Tablet Paul Harris Fellow (the greatest acknowledgment of Rotary Clubs) for the diffusion of Italian culture;
  • 18 April 2019: the Chilean government awarded the astronomer with a medal, as official recognition for the work done in the exploration of the Black hole.
  • 12 August 2019: A Tablet is given by the Mayor of Alcamo for her prestigious career in the field of scientific research.
  • 2020: Together with the other Astrophysicists who realized the photo of the Black hole, she was awarded with the prestigious Breakthrough Prize (2020).[6]
  • 11 August 2021: Yearly Prize by the Kiwanis club of Alcamo, with the following motivation: To Violette Impellizzeri, astronomer with an international fame, for her dedication for the study of the mysteries of universe and for the safeguard of environment.

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Astrofisica? Può essere semplice. Violette Impellizzeri lo sa". 16 October 2016.
  2. ^ a b "L'Astronoma siciliana che in Cile svela i segreti delle antiche galassie".
  3. ^ https://www.alma-allegro.nl/
  4. ^ a b "La foto del secolo? Perché non mi emoziona l'immagine del Buco nero M87".
  5. ^ a b "Black Hole Imaged for First Time by Event Horizon Telescope". 15 April 2017.
  6. ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Winners of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics Announced".

Sources[]

External links[]

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