Contact and Biography

Anna Wolter

Via Brera, 28
20121 Milano
Italy
Tel: +39-02-72320321
E-mail: eson-italy@eso.org

Anna Wolter is an astrophysicist, and has been working at the INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Milan, Italy since 1991. After a physics degree in Milan she began her scientific career at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There she helped to construct one of the best-exploited surveys of X-ray sources, serendipitously found in the Einstein Observatory images, the Extended Medium Sensitivity Survey (EMSS). She has dealt with all kinds of X-ray emitters, from stars to clusters of galaxies, but her main interest was with the class of the highly luminous and variable galaxy nuclei called BL Lacs. More recently she has moved from the point-like sources at the centres of galaxies to the diffuse/unresolved emission within them. She now devotes much of her time to the study of ultraluminous X-ray sources, a puzzling class of sources in external galaxies, which probably harbour heavy black holes, intermediate in mass between the light stellar ones and the supermassive nuclei at the centre of galaxies. Part to the time she focuses on the statistical analysis of complete samples, deriving luminosity functions, and for the remainder she studies in detail a few selected and complex objects, like galaxies, which have many different components that contribute to the overall emission. The main wavelength of interest is always X-ray, but Anna believes that a multiwavelength approach is important for a complete insight into an astronomical problem and so has worked with almost every energy band accessible. She is Principal Investigator of optical, radio, X-ray and gamma-ray observations of various celestial sources. She is author and co-author of about a hundred papers in refereed journals and about as many contributions to International meetings. In the last ten years she has devoted a significant fraction of her time to both teaching and outreach activities. She delivers lectures on key topics as part of the astrophysics curriculum at the Milan universities, and tutors Laurea and post-Laurea students. She delivers conferences and lectures for the public and for high school and middle school classes on various astrophysical topics.