Hello everybody and welcome to my web page!

What I work on

I’m Silvia Onorato, Ph.D. Student at Leiden Observatory, working in the ENIGMA group led by Prof. Joseph F. Hennawi. I study high-redshift quasars (z>6.5), focusing on the analysis of optical and NIR spectra that are taken mainly with Keck/NIRES, Gemini/GNIRS, and VLT/X-Shooter spectrographs and then reduced with the open-source Python-based spectroscopic data reduction pipeline PypeIt. The goal of my Ph.D. project is to infer information both on the average hydrogen neutral fraction at the epoch of Reionization and on the growth of the first supermassive black holes. My current sample consists of 44 high-z (6.50<z<7.65) quasars fully reduced. For the first part of my project, I’m going to make them publicly available, create a composite spectrum that can be compared to others, including lower-z ones (Onorato et al. 2023a in prep), and analyze their proximity zone sizes (Onorato et al. 2023b in prep).

About myself

I was born in Palermo on 15/06/1996 and until 19 years old I lived in my hometown, Bagheria (PA). Then I moved to Bologna, where I graduated in astrophysics at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. During my Master’s thesis, I worked on Globular Clusters (GCs), studying the distribution of Multiple Populations in the isolated and dynamically young system NGC 2419 to place observational constraints on the initial formation and evolution scenarios of GCs (Onorato et al. 2023, published on A&A). During my Ph.D. project I’ve been moving to the research field I’m currently working on, focusing on high-z quasars.

I like spending my leisure time with friends, watching tv-series or movies, listening to music, reading books, and traveling.

Contact

Leiden Observatory - Oort building

Niels Bohrweg 2, 2333 CA Leiden (The Netherlands)

E-mail: onorato@strw.leidenuniv.nl