Patrizia Caraveo (born April 8, 1954, Milan) is an Italian astrophysicist.
Biography
Patrizia Caraveo graduated in Physics at the physics department of the University of Milan in 1977. After a period abroad, in 2002 she began working at the Institute of Cosmic Physics in Milan as Director of Research, and is currently Director of the institute. She has worked on several international space missions dedicated to particle physics, starting with the European mission Cos-B. She is currently involved in the European INTEGRAL mission, the NASA Swift mission, the Italian AGILE mission and the NASA Fermi mission, all of which are now in orbit and fully operational.
Her main field of interest is the behavior of neutron stars at different wavelengths. She was among the first to understand the fundamental role of neutron stars in particle physics. After years of efforts to explain the first unidentified pulsar radio emission, she identified the neutron star Geminga. She has developed a multi-wavelength strategy for the identification of galactic gamma-ray sources. She is a member of the International Astronomical Union. Since 1997, Caraveo has worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Pavia. She is married to the physicist Giovanni Bignami.
Research
Her first ten years' research were devoted almost entirely to the analysis and interpretation of data collected from gamma astronomy satellite Cos-B, and the beginning of the study of X-ray astronomy with the analysis of data collected by the Einstein Observatory and EXOSAT. In the following period, her interests widened to include all of multi-wavelength astronomy, especially optical astronomy and interpretation of its results.
Since her thesis work, Caraveo has taken part in the development of multi-wavelength observations that led to the discovery and understanding of the neutron star Geminga. This required the use of multiple optical instruments both on the ground and in space. She has used observations from satellites such as SAS-2, HEAO-1, Cos-B, Einstein, EXOSAT, Ginga, ROSAT, Egret, EUVE, Hubble, Hipparcos, XMM-Newton, and Chandra, in addition to ground-based telescopes such as the Very Large Array. The results of Geminga have opened a new chapter in astrophysics: the study of unidentified gamma-ray sources. This is now one of the main topics of research by several groups around the world.
Her identification of Geminga, the first neutron star to show no radio emissions, has opened the way for a more general study of the phenomenology and number of optical pulsars. Caraveo and her team are dedicated to studying the color, motions, and distances of neutron stars, along with the relationship between neutron stars and young supernova remnants. With the use of parallax with Geminga, Caraveo accomplished the first optical measurement of the distance to an isolated neutron star. The correlation of data from Hipparcos with images from the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the absolute position of the faint optical counterpart of Geminga, was chosen by the European Space Agency as one of the 30 success stories presented at the Ministerial Conference in May 1999 (see ESA BR 147).
Caraveo's continuous improvement to the techniques of analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope allowed the measurement of the proper motion of the Crab pulsar and then proper motion and parallax of the pulsar in the constellation of Sails, yielding a result much closer than she had expected. In both cases there was a significant alignment between the direction of the proper motion vector and the X-ray jets revealed by these two neutron stars. This alignment has profound implications for the physics of the explosion of supernovae.
Using the telescope XMM-Newton, Caraveo has contributed to the first direct measurement of the magnetic field of an isolated neutron star, thanks to the discovery of cyclotron absorption lines in the data source 1E1207-59, a neutron star at the center of a supernova with no radio counterpart.