Milky Way
Image: Created by DALL-E
The Milky Way is our home galaxy: a disk of stars spinning around, with a supermassive black hole in its center. The Sun sits two thirds of the way from the center, close -but not too much- to the external ridge of the disk.
We sit approximately 8 kiloparsecs away from the very central regions of the disk, and the light emitted from the stars orbiting the central black holes takes approximately twenty-five thousand years to reach us (yes: that means that it was emitted before Homo Sapiens even thought about agriculture, let alone fermenting grape juice).
The disk counts approximately 10 billion suns altogether, yet what makes most of our own galaxy’s mass -as well as that of all others- is the elusive Dark Matter.
Over the last two decades I have dedicated much of my research to understanding how Dark Matter is distributed within the Milky Way, what’s her mass, and how this affects research on the very nature of Dark Matter. This is something that we do combining several types of observations of stars within our galactic disk and beyond, and bring it together within the coherent picture of galaxy formation as we understand it from the cosmological model.
Here you can find a list of samples of my contributions to the field, those I believe are more interesting, at least for now. Please do not hesitate to contact me would you have any question or curiosity.
