Michele Moresco

Senior Assistant Professor fixed term (RTDb)
Department of Physics and Astronomy "Augusto Righi"
University of Bologna.

I am an observational cosmologist working at University of Bologna. My main research areas are galaxy evolution, large-scale structure of the Universe and, more in general, observational cosmology, with a particular interest in the study of new cosmological probes to constrain the expansion rate of the Universe.

News

Invited review article: "Unveiling the Universe with Emerging Cosmological Probes"

In this review for Living Reviews in Relativity, we provide the latest advances in emerging “beyond-standard” cosmological probes, presenting cosmic chronometers, quasars, gamma-ray bursts, standard sirens, lensing time-delay with galaxies and clusters, cosmic voids, neutral hydrogen intensity mapping, surface brightness fluctuations, secular redshift drift, and clustering of standard candles. This is meant to be a state-of-art benchmark on the progress for these probes, where we discuss in detail for each probe the basic equations, how the measurements is performed, the latest results and forecasts, and the systematics involved.

Research

Cosmic chronometers

The cosmic chronometers are cosmological probes to measure the expansion history of the Universe in a cosmology-independent way. First introduced by Jimenez & Loeb (2002), the basic idea is that the differential age evolution of very massive and passively evolving galaxies in a given redshift bin can be used to directly measure the Hubble parameter H(z)=-1/(1+z)dz/dt, without relying on any cosmological assumption apart from a FRLW metric. If you are using cosmic chronometer data, you will find in this gitlab repository the detailed recipes (with examples) on how to correctly estimate the covariance matrix for cosmic chronometers (taken from Moresco et al. (2020)).

Three-point correlation function

The importance of the 3PCF resides in the fact that it is the first significant order allowing us a statistical study of non-perfectly Gaussian fields, which otherwise will be completely described by their 2-point correlation function. The 3PCF provides a complementary information to lower-order statistics, and it is fundamental to constrain possible non-Gaussianities, to break the degeneracies between cosmological parameters from a combined analysis of 2- and 3-point correlation functions, and to provide independent constraints on the BAO signal.

Galaxy evolution

I am also interested in studying the physical and evolutionary properties of massive and passive galaxies, to study the mechanisms driving their formation and evolution and to develop optimal selection criteria, analyzing possible systematic effects and biases. These criteria have been applied to different spectroscopic surveys to obtain samples of massive and passive galaxies covering the widest possible redshift range as homogeneously as possible, to be able to map the evolution of the Universe up to 8-9 billion years ago (z~1-1.5).

Publications

You can find a complete list of my publications on ADS.

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