Prof. Antonaldo Diaferio
Antonaldo Diaferio is professor of Cosmology at the University of Torino. He obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy at the Universities of Milano and Pavia in 1995 and spent a few years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA and at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, Germany before moving back to Italy. He works on the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure and on alternative theories of gravity. He chaired the IAU Colloquium 195 "Outskirts of Galaxy Clusters: Intense Life in the Suburbs" and coauthored a book on clusters of galaxies ("Clusters of Galaxies: Beyond the Thermal View"). With Margaret Geller and Ken Rines at the CfA, he developed the caustic technique to estimate the masses of clusters to far beyond the virial radius.
Luisa Ostorero is assistant professor at the Physics Department of the University of Torino. She obtained her Ph.D. at the same University in 2003. She spent three years at the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University (ZAH/LSW, Germany), and a semester at the Tuorla Astronomical Observatory (Turku, Finland), before moving back to Italy. She was also guest scientist of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA, USA) and of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge, MA, USA). She works on Active Galactic Nuclei (blazars and young radio galaxies) and on non-standard cosmological models.
Valentina Cesare is a PhD student in Physics at the University of Torino. She obtained her master degree at the same university in 2017, with a thesis about the study of the dynamics of disk galaxies in Newton gravity and with the two theories of modified gravity MOND and Refracted Gravity, and she obtained her bachelor degree in 2015, with a thesis about magnetohydrodynamic simulations of astrophysical jets. She is now investigating the dynamics of galaxies with Refracted Gravity, continuing the work of her master thesis, and she is publishing a paper about this topic.
Arianna Gallo Arianna Gallo is a graduate student at the University of Torino. She graduated in 2018 in Astrophysics with the thesis "The journey of hypervelocity stars" under the supervision of Prof. Luisa Ostorero. She started a PhD fellowship in Turin on October 1st 2018. The aim of her PhD project is the investigation of the Milky Way dark matter halo using hypervelocity stars as tracing masses. She wants to quantify the sensitivity that future astrometric missions must have to distinguish among different Milky Way dark matter halo shapes.