Giovanni is a researcher at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) in Madrid, where he is the coordinator of the Galaxy Formation and Evolution Group. His research focuses on the study of accreting black holes with an emphasis on Active Galactic Nuclei. His main scientific goals are to understand how supermassive black holes accrete matter from their surroundings and how they evolve over cosmic time together with their host galaxies.
He pays special attention to the behaviour of accretion flows in the immediate vicinity of black holes and to the relativistic effects occurring there. He particularly likes when sources exhibit strong variability, a key tool with which to explore the physics of the accretion flow around black holes and the scaling of its properties with black hole mass.
On Athena, Giovanni is a co-chair of the Topical Panel on “The supermassive black hole close environments” and a member of the X-IFU Science Advisory Team (XSAT).
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Image: The background image is a numerical simulation of hot plasma swirling around an accreting black hole [Credit: Scott C. Noble - NASA-GSFC/Univ. of Tulsa, USA]. The purple line is a ~ 38 hour XMM-Newton light curve of the accreting black hole at the center of the Galaxy GSN 069: quasi-periodic high amplitude X-ray flares (dubbed ‘Quasi-Periodic Eruptions’ or QPEs) separated by about 9 hours are seen [G. Miniutti et al., 2019, Nature, 573, 381].