Stefano Zibetti

The main focus of my research is the study of stellar mass in galaxies, in particular: calibration of stellar mass photometric estimators, including testing of stellar population synthesis models; resolved studies of the stellar mass distribution, using imaging, integral field spectroscopy (in collaboration with CALIFA), infrared data constraining the amount and properties of dust (in collaboration with KINGFISH and HeViCS). How the stellar mass density influences and is related to the internal physics of galaxies and hence their evolution is the key scientific question I am addressing in my research.

On this topic I am also contributing to the study of high-redshift galaxies with deep near infrared imaging (VLT/HAWK-I) and deep high-resolution optical/near-infrared spectra (VLT/X-SHOOTER)in collaboration with colleagues in Germany and Denmark.

I am actively investigating the properties of QSO host galaxies, in particular by means of imaging stacking, in order to derive the fundamental scaling relations between supermassive black holes and galaxy properties on large samples of several thousands objects.

Other projects to which I am currently contributing include: photometric and spectroscopic studies of galaxy counterparts of QSO absorbing systems; deep imaging studies of stellar halos of galaxies and intracluster light (which where also the focus of my PhD thesis); the dependence of galaxy properties on multiscale environmental density.