Laura Ferrarese's work has earned her the opportunity to spearhead projects using facilities such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.[3] Her work concentrates on the masses of supermassive black holes and the stellar velocity dispersions of their host galaxies, and how they affect each other. She has also researched active galactic nuclei, galaxy dynamics and scaling relations, the extragalactic distance scale and the expansion rate of the Universe.[4] In her work, Ferrarese uses data from ground and space-based observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
According to the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System,[5][1] she has published 177 peer reviewed papers, which have collected over 20,000 citation. Her h-index is 66.
On 30 November 2000, Ferrarese was featured in one of the episodes called "supermassive black holes" in the Horizon TV series.
Publications
Ferrarese's most cited peer-review publications include:[5]
"A Fundamental Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2000 [8]
"Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, 2001 [9]
"Central Masses and Broad-Line Region Sizes of Active Galactic Nuclei. II. A Homogeneous Analysis of a Large Reverberation-Mapping Database", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, 2004 [10]
"Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past Present and Future Research", appeared in Space Science Reviews, 2005[11]
"Beyond the Bulge: A Fundamental Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Dark Matter Halos", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2002 [12]
"The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. VI. Isophotal Analysis and the Structure of Early-Type Galaxies", appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2006[13]
Affiliations
Laura Ferrarese is an active member of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) and is affiliated with Division B Facilities, Technologies and Data Science, Division H Interstellar Matter and Local Universe and Division J Galaxies and Cosmology. She was a Past Member of Division VIII Galaxies & the Universe until 2012 and Commission 28 Galaxies until 2015 within the IAU.[14] She is also a member of the American Astronomical Society and of the Canadian Astronomical Society.
^Peterson, Bradley M.; Ferrarese, Laura; et al. (October 2004). "Central Masses and Broad-Line Region Sizes of Active Galactic Nuclei. II. A Homogeneous Analysis of a Large Reverberation-Mapping Database". Astrophysical Journal. 613 (2): 682–699. arXiv:astro-ph/0407299. Bibcode:2004ApJ...613..682P. doi:10.1086/423269. S2CID16308360.