Piero Ranalli

Welcome! This is my personal site at the Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physics of the University of Lund, Sweden, where I am a senior post-doc researcher.

This page was previously hosted at the Institute of Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing (IAASARS) of the National Observatory of Athens (NOA), Greece, where I had a fixed-term researcher position in the years 2012-2015 (MuSES project).

I am also an associate of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) at the Bologna Observatory, and a member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

Latest papers:

• "The unabsorbed luminosity function of AGN from the XMM-Newton LSS, CDFS and COSMOS surveys", accepted by A&A
• "The XMM-Newton survey in the H-ATLAS field", A&A 577 (2015), 121

Research interests

Since I moved to Lund Observatory: Synergies between the ESA Gaia and Plato missions. Exoplanet detection techniques.

X-ray observations of galaxies and AGN. Luminosity functions, number counts. High resolution spectroscopy of plasma emission. Astrostatistics. Software development.

You may also look at my papers.

I am a member of the XMM-CDFS, CDFS, COSMOS and XMM-XXL international collaborations.

Software

This is software that I wrote and that I release in the hope that it may be useful, under a free software license.

• cdfs-sim: A simulator of X-ray astronomical observations. The most important features are the accuracy in the PSF and background reproduction, and its speed. It currently simulates XMM-Newton observations, but it may be extended to other missions (Chandra, Athena+, ...). It has been used to derive the coverage curves of the XMM-CDFS and the Stripe-82 surveys.
• cdfs-extract: A program to extract spectra and aperture photometry from multiple sources in multiple XMM-Newton observations. It has been used in the XMM-CDFS survey to extract the spectra (Comastri et al., in preparation) and the photometry for the variability study (Paolillo et al., in preparation).
• autoregions: define source and background extraction regions with maximum signal/noise ratio, to be used with cdfs-extract.
• LFtools: a set of programs to compute luminosity functions. Given a catalogue, an area curve, and (optionally) the photo-z probability distributions, it computes luminosity functions as binned estimates,
  maximum likelihood fits, and performs Bayesian parameter exploration. Currently it includes the LDDE and LADE models. It makes full use of photometric redshift probability distributions and can apply statistical corrections for absorption. It is being used by the XMM-CDFS and XMM-XXL collaborations (Ranalli et al., in preparation).
• griddetect: run emldetect on wide mosaics. On a wide mosaic with many pointings, emldetect may not run because of memory constraints. This tool comes to the rescue: it places all pointings in a grid, and repeats the detection on each grid cell using all overlapping pointings. No data is wasted in this way, and emldetect can always use the correct PSF for each observation.

There is also a PDF version of the poster which I prepared for the X-ray Universe 2014 conference in Dublin, where these programs are presented.