| Violette Impellizzeri | |
| Birth Date: | 15 August 1977 |
| Birth Place: | Palermo, Italy |
| Nationality: | Italian |
| Alma Mater: | University of Bristol Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie |
| Occupation: | Astronomer, astrophysicist and university teacher |
Violette Impellizzeri (born August 15, 1977) is an Italian astronomer, astrophysicist, and professor.[1]
Violette Impellizzeri, an Italian astrophysicist, was born in Saronno, a comune in the Province of Varese, Italy. She completed her primary and secondary education in Alcamo, Sicily, before relocating with her family to Karlsruhe, Germany, where her father was employed as a teacher.
Impellizzeri earned her European Baccalaureate at the European School of Karlsruhe. In 1995, she enrolled at the University of Bristol, where she obtained a master's degree in physics. She later pursued a doctorate in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute für Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany.
Following her doctoral studies, Impellizzeri undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia.[2] She also worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) for three years, focusing on physical cosmology and megamasers as part of the Megamaser Cosmology Project (MCP).
Since 2011, she has worked at ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile as an astronomer. In October 2020, she moved back to Europe to work as a program manager with Allegro (ALMA Local Expertise Group) and the European ALMA Regional Center (ARC) node in the Netherlands, hosted by Leiden Observatory. She currently teaches at Leiden University.[3]
Violette Impellizzeri focused on Active Galactic Nuclei during her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. As part of her research, she conducted a series of observations using the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope to detect water masers (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in distant galaxies. Her efforts were successful, and the discovery was later confirmed by observations made with the Very Large Array Radio Telescope in New Mexico, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The findings were published in Nature.[4] This discovery is significant for cosmological research, particularly in the study of the universe's expansion. It has important implications for the calculation of the Hubble constant, which measures the relationship between the distance and velocity of galaxies, a key factor in understanding the rate of cosmic expansion.[5]
In 2007, while at the University of Virginia, Impellizzeri was recruited by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to contribute to the Megamaser Cosmology Project (MCP), a significant cosmological research initiative. She coordinated research efforts at the Green Bank Telescope in Virginia, integrating these with observations made using the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) system. Impellizzeri worked on the project for three years and continued to collaborate on it for the following ten years.[5]
Impellizzeri joined the Atacama Cosmology Telescope project - the largest radio telescope in the world at the 5 km altitude, - as a NRAO astronomer tasked with the integration of the VLBI observations within Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) (under the title of friend of VLBI).[6] She participated in data integration with other remote telescopes, where a distance of 10,000 kilometers can be leveraged as if the observations were made by one giant telescope[7] with a 10,000 km diameter.
In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) began observations with the goal of capturing the first-ever image of a black hole, a phenomenon previously considered only in theory. This endeavor resulted in the first direct proof of black holes' existence, culminating in the publication of an image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, located 56 million light-years away. This black hole has a mass of 6.5 billion solar masses.
The groundbreaking image was made possible through the combined efforts of several telescopes, including the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), APEX, the 30-meter IRAM telescope in Grenoble, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Alfonso Serrano Telescope, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope.