The next INAF PhD School Francesco Lucchin will be held in Asiago, during the week May 25-30 2025.
The school is intended for students currently enrolled in any PhD program in Italy. Foreigners students are also welcomed to apply, but we require them to contact us first, as the school has a limited number of participants.
The topics covered by the school are:
Solar System:
The Solar System serves as a unique laboratory for studying planetary formation, dynamics, and evolution, offering insights that enhance our understanding of other planetary systems. Recent missions to asteroids and the outer Solar System have provided groundbreaking data on planetary processes and habitability. Planetary formation theories explain how planets and smaller bodies emerged from the protoplanetary disk, settled into their configurations, and interacted to shape the Solar System’s architecture. Gravitational interactions, collisions, and redistribution of smaller bodies drive these evolutionary changes. Studying the outer planets, their magnetospheres, and icy satellites deepens our understanding of planetary atmospheres and surface interactions, aiding the search for habitability. Meanwhile, small bodies like asteroids and comets act as "fossils" from the Solar System's formation, revealing the physical and chemical conditions of the early protoplanetary disk.
This PhD program will focus on three main research areas:
Theories of planetary formation, exploring the mechanisms that govern the formation and evolution of planets and their interactions with smaller bodies.
Environments of the outer planetary systems and the processes within, including detailed studies of exospheres, magnetospheres, and satellites to understand their dynamics and evolution.
Advanced observational techniques for studying small Solar System bodies, leveraging both ground-based and space-based instruments.
High redshift galaxies:
High-redshift galaxies provide a unique and invaluable glimpse into the early universe, offering crucial insights into its formation and subsequent evolution. These distant galaxies, observed at redshifts z>6, correspond to an era when the universe was only a small fraction of its current age, allowing us to witness the conditions during the first billion years after the Big Bang. Observing these galaxies is fundamental to understanding key epochs in the history of the universe, such as the Epoch of Reionization—a transformative period when the neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium was ionized by the radiation from the first luminous sources. The properties of high-redshift galaxies, including their star formation rates, stellar masses, chemical enrichment, and dust content, provide critical constraints on the mechanisms of galaxy formation and growth. These galaxies also allow us to study the role of dark matter in driving the hierarchical assembly of cosmic structures, as well as the feedback processes from star formation and active galactic nuclei that regulate their evolution.
During the course, we plan to cover three highly complementary topics:
(i) cosmological models and theories of universe formation,
(ii) the era of reionization, a crucial phase in the universe’s history,
(iii) the characterization of the physical properties of high-redshift galaxies and differences with the local universe.
Through this program, students will acquire the theoretical and practical expertise needed to address fundamental questions in science and contribute to groundbreaking discoveries in astrophysics.
