Chiara Mazzucchelli

Assistant Professor

I am an assistant professor working in extra-galactic astrophysics, focusing on very luminous active galactic nuclei (quasars) in the epoch of reionization.

Projects

My current research focuses on the discovery and characterization of the first luminous quasars in the very early universe (i.e. ~800 Myr old). These objects host very massive black holes in their centers, and they are formidable beacons of the pristine cosmic times. I am interested both in their physical properties and in the environments where they live in, which are predicted to be among the richest in the first Gyr of the universe. I am recently focusing on early quasars with powerful radio-jets, in particular working on characterizing the role of the jets in the early black hole growth, and in the black hole/host-galaxy co-evolution.

Highlights

I am currently part of different international collaborations aimed at studying early quasars using state-of-the-art facilities, e.g., among others, XQR-30 (https://xqr30.inaf.it/) and EREBUS-ASPIRE (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021jwst.prop.2078W/abstract).
I am part of the Board of Directors of SOCHIAS as President for the period 2025-2026. https://sochias.cl/directiva/
I am also part of a Chilean-based 4MOST community survey (ChANGES; https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/messenger/archive/no.190-mar23/messenger-no190-34-37.pdf).
Among others, we published papers on the discovery of the most distant quasar known at that time (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018ApJ…861L..14B/abstract; https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/found-most-distant-black-hole) and of the most distant quasar with powerful radio-jets known yet (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ…909…80B/abstract ; https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2103/).