Marco Scodeggio - Research

Marco Scodeggio: Research Activities

In this page you can find out a few things about the main subjects of my research activity in Astronomy. I am mostly interested in

  1. The star formation histories of present epoch galaxies
  2. The Tully-Fisher and Fundamental Plane relations, as tools for measuring both redshift-inedependent distances and the evolution of stellar populations in late- and early-type galaxies
  3. Clusters of galaxies, both nearby and at high redshift
  4. The evolution of galaxies from z=2 to the present epoch, as it can be observed with large spectroscopic surveys

Star Formation Histories

A database containing multi-wavelength information on approximately 2000 galaxies, located in 9 nearby clusters of galaxies and in a lower density supercluster environment, has been used to study their formation histories. The main result from this study, so far limited to the late-type galaxy population, is that in these galaxies the mass is the main regulator of the star formation activity, with massive luminous galaxies forming their stars quickly after they were formed, and low mass low luminosity objects forming stars at an almost uniform rate through their lifetime.

Tully-Fisher and Fundamental Plane relations

My Ph.D. Thesis project was centered on an empirical verification of the universality of the Fundamental Plane relation. This verification was obtained by comparing accurate distance estimates to eight nearby clusters of galaxies obtained independently with the Fundamental Plane and the Tully-Fisher relations. The Tully-Fisher data came from the nearby clusters sample of Riccardo Giovanelli, Martha Haynes and collaborators (you can find more details about that project here), while the Fundamental Plane data was obtained specifically for my thesis project.
In case you care to know all the details, you can get a copy of my thesis.

Using the photometric data obtained for my thesis, a new scaling relation for early-type galaxies was discovered, the Photometric Fundamental Plane. This relation is very similar to the Fundamental Plane relation, but is built using only photometric parameters, and is therefore a lot easier to obtain.

Clusters of Galaxies

We have used the Postman matched filter algorithm to search for high redshift clusters in the sky area covered by the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS). We have so far analyzed data that cover an area of 14 square degrees, and identified 302 cluster candidates.
The list of cluster candidates can be found here, while the details of the searching procedure are in a paper by L.F. Olsen et al. that can be found here.
If you would like to apply your favorite algorithm to the data and do your own cluster search, you gan get the EIS data from the ESO Archive.

Observational Cosmology, Surveys, and the evolution of galaxies

Large catalogs of galaxies with accurately measured photometric and spectroscopic parameters are being assembled to measure the evolution of galaxies over a large fraction of the past history of the Universe. The two surveys I am currently involved with are the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS), and the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS).
Created by Marco Scodeggio (marcos@lambrate.inaf.it); last updated February 8, 2006.