My paper on Laniakea with Leo Giani, Cullan Howlett, Khaled Said, and Tam Davis, which I previously reported on in an earlier news item, has now officially been published in JCAP! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are JCAP 2401 (2024) 071. Here is a link to the paper (which is published Open Access).
YouTube videos on our Laniakea paper
A number of well-known YouTubers have provided in-depth coverage of our Laniakea paper over the past two months, with their videos tallying up over a million views! Three stand our particularly:
Anton Petrov - link
Dr. Becky (Rebecca - Becky - Smethurst) - link
PBS Space Time (Matt O’Dowd) - link
I found all three to be excellently presented, and rather accurate scientifically. Funnily enough, I didn’t come across them myself, but they were pointed out to me by three different students (“Prof., your work is on YouTube” 😅). I really enjoyed watching these videos, and I hope you do too!
PhD defense of Tiziano Schiavone
Today I had the pleasure of serving as external committee member for the PhD thesis discussion of Tiziano Schiavone, a PhD student at the University of Pisa supervised by Giovanni Marozzi, Giovanni Montani, and Giuseppe Fanizza. Tiziano wrote an excellent thesis by the title of “Large-scale structure of the Universe in General Relativity and beyond”, which on the one hand studied the impact of local inhomogeneities on cosmological observables, and on the other hand examined ways to distinguish between ΛCDM and competing cosmological models, particularly those based on modifications to gravity, especially in light of cosmological tensions. The other two committee members were my collaborator Eleonora Di Valentino and Scilla Degl’Innocenti. Unfortunately I could not be present in person for the first ever PhD defense of which I am committe member (I would have loved to visit the beautiful city of Pisa after many years). Tiziano’s defense was excellent (the final mark we gave was “ottimo”, which roughly translates to something between “very good” and “excellent”), and he will now be moving to the University of Lisbon as a Della Riccia fellow for his first postdoc - congratulations Tiziano!