About the event

The Women in Physics Student Club is very happy to host Prof. Raffaella Schneider in our second WiP Seminars event.

In the WiP Seminars you have the chance to not only learn about research carried out by internationally renowned physicists, but also participate in an informal conversation with them and ask about their career. Be sure to register!

Raffaella Schneider is a full professor in astrophysics at the physics department of Sapienza University of Rome, with a vast experience in several observatories and universities around the world. Her work is mostly theoretical but with tight connections with observations, both in the electromagnetic and gravitational-wave bands.

About the speaker

Raffaella Schneider is a full professor in astrophysics at the physics department of Sapienza University of Rome, where she was awarded her PhD in 2000 working on astrophysical sources of gravitational waves under the supervision of Prof. Valeria Ferrari. As a postdoctoral fellow, she moved to Florence, at the astrophysical observatory of Arcetri, where she started to investigate the nature and properties of the first stars. In 2005 she was appointed as staff researcher of INAF (Italian national astrophysics institute), first in Florence and then at the astronomical observatory in Rome.

In 2012 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to investigate the properties of the first stars and galaxies and in 2017 she moved to Sapienza University. She has been visiting scientist of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of UC Santa Barbara, [University of Texas at Austin](https://www.utexas.edu/, Institute d’Astrophysique Paris, Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, University of Zurich, Dark Cosmology Center in Copenhagen, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Mitaka, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich.

Her research interests range from understanding the properties of low-metallicity stellar populations to the early phases of metal and dust enrichment, cosmic reionization, the nature of the first black hole seeds, and the build-up of the first super-massive black holes. Her work is mostly theoretical but with tight connections with observations, both in the electromagnetic and gravitational-wave bands. Co-author of the astronomy book for children, Apri gli occhi al cielo, she carries out an intense dissemination activity, participating in initiatives aimed at schools and the general public, with a special focus on gender issues.

Abstract of the seminar

Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to ≈ 700 million years after the Big Bang. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier, where the initial density fluctuations mapped by the cosmic microwave background radiation grew by many orders of magnitude, paving the way to the formation of the first stars, supernovae and black holes. During this critical phase, the Universe was transformed from its initial simple state to a highly complex system through the injection of the first heavy elements from supernovae and the emission of light from the first stars and accreting black holes. It also witnessed the assembly of the first galaxies that, according to the hierarchical structure formation paradigm, represent the building blocks of larger systems, such as our own Milky Way. Excitingly, we are at the verge of a revolution of research into this field as the James Webb Space Telescope will enable an unprecedented epochal leap forward. In this talk, I will attempt to review our current understanding of the nature of the first stars and black holes, and the impact they had on the first billion year of cosmic history and on the properties of the first galaxies and super-massive black holes.