Into The Impossible

Prof. Chiara Mingarelli is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist, looking to understand how supermassive black holes in the centers of massive galaxies merge, if at all. She does this by predicting their nanohertz gravitational-wave signatures, which will soon be detected by pulsar timing array experiments. With pulsar timing data, She looks for both individual supermassive black holes in binary systems, and for the gravitational-wave background which should be generated by their cosmic merger history. She an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, and an associate research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute. Before joining the CCA she was a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at Caltech and at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. PRESS RELEASE: In data gathered and analyzed over 13 years, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has found an intriguing low-frequency signal that may be attributab