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Riccardo Arcodia

NASA Einstein Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research

  1. About me

    I was born and raised in Italy and, before moving to Boston/Cambridge, I lived in Munich (Germany) for over 5 years. When I am not doing research, you can find me enjoying a few hobbies. …

  2. About me

    I was born and raised in Italy and, before moving to Boston/Cambridge, I lived in Munich (Germany) for over 5 years. When I am not doing research, you can find me enjoying a few hobbies. …

  3. Quasi-periodic eruptions

    Recently I have dedicated a lot of my efforts to the discovery and study of new rare outliers in the family of accreting black holes in the nuclei of galaxies, the so-called quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs). QPEs are high-amplitude bursts of X-ray radiation recurring every few hours and originating near the central massive black holes of relatively small galaxies. …

  4. Massive black holes

    Why do we care about massive black holes (MBHs) in local low-mass galaxies? First, one day we will find the elusive population of nuclear intermediate mass black holes, their smaller cousins, in galaxies like these, perhaps a bit smaller and fainter. Plus, the low-mass end of galaxies and their nuclear black holes may also constrain the leading seeding mechanism at high-z (e.g. see Greene et al., 2020). …

  5. X-ray absorption from the intergalactic medium

    As Master’s degree project (Arcodia et al., 2018), I have studied the X-ray absorption contribution from the intergalactic medium (IGM) in a blazar sample. Absorption from the intergalactic medium has been invoked to solve the co-called “missins baryons” problem and finding unambiguous confirmation of this effect in X-ray data, where most of these transitions are predicted to be, would have major implications for our understanding of the Universe. However, past and current generations of X-ray detectors only allow detailed characterization of X-ray absorbers for very few bright and nearby sources. In absence of this, X-ray spectra can provide information of the cumulative absorption along the line of sight. Even after subtracting the fairly well-known contribution from our own Galaxy, a strong degeneracy would remain between absorption local to the source’s host galaxy, and within the IGM. However, blazars are jetted AGN in which the line of sight is along the jet. From this viewpoint, the host galaxy is thought to be swept of most absorbers. Thus, we thought that analyzing the coarse cumulative X-ray absorption in blazars has the cleanest view of the IGM contribution. …

  6. CV

    I am currently a NASA Einstein Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. I was previously a postdoctoral researcher in Astrophysics working in the high-energy group of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching (Germany), where I have also recently taken my PhD with the Thesis “Accretion onto black holes across the mass scale”. For my research interests, see here. …

  7. The disk-corona interplay

    The most luminous phenomena in the Universe are somewhat related to accretion onto black holes. This is a multi-scale phenomenon that goes from the black hole event horizon to much larger distances, up to galaxies outskirts for super-massive black holes sitting at their centres. Accretion of mass onto black holes is also what allows them to grow over cosmic time. However, an in-depth understanding of all the related observed properties is far from being reached. During my PhD at MPE, I have tackled some of the open questions related to black hole accretion both in bright active supermassive black holes and stellar-mass black holes. …

  8. Research

    My research focuses on studying transient and persistent accretion events onto black holes of different masses, from X-ray and optically bright active supermassive black holes to stellar-mass black holes, going through massive black holes in low-mass galaxies. Most of my efforts are dedicated to the discovery and study of new rare outliers in the family of accreting black holes in the nuclei of galaxies, the so-called quasi-periodic eruptions. …

  9. CV

    I am currently a NASA Einstein Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. I was previously a postdoctoral researcher in Astrophysics working in the high-energy group of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching (Germany), where I have also recently taken my PhD with the Thesis “Accretion onto black holes across the mass scale”. For my research interests, see here. …