VST Early-type galaxy Survey 

(VEGAS)

The VST Early-type Galaxy Survey (VEGAS), which I have been leading since 2016, provides deep multi-band (ugri) images of early-type galaxies (ETGs) in different environments. 

VEGAS is carried out using the ESO VLT Survey Telescope (VST). Taking advantage of the wide (1 square degree) field-of-view of OmegaCAM@VST, the long integration time, and the wide variety of targets, VEGAS  turned out to be a gold mine to explore the structure of galaxies down to the faintest surface brightness levels of μg~27−30 mag/arcsec^2, in dense clusters of galaxies as well as in the unexplored poor groups of galaxies and to provide the set of observables that can be directly compared with the theoretical predictions. 

In short, with VEGAS data we 

1- studied the galaxy outskirts, detect the intra-cluster light and LSB features in the intra-cluster/group space (see Iodice et al. 2016, 2017a, 2019a,c; Spavone et al. 2018; Cattapan et al. 2019; Raj et al. 2019, 2020; Iodice et al. 2020), 

2- estimated the mass assembly of galaxies by deriving the accreted mass fraction in the stellar halos and providing results that can be directly compared with the predictions of galaxy formation models (see Iodice et al. 2016, 2017b; Spavone et al. 2017, 2020), 

3- traced the spatial distribution of candidate GCs, which are the oldest sub-structures in the inter-galactic environments (D’Abrusco et al. 2016; Cantiello et al. 2015, 2018, 2020); 

4- provided the largest size and magnitude-limited catalog of dwarf galaxies and UDGs in groups and clusters (Venhola et al. 2018, 2019; Prole et al. 2019; Forbes 2019, 2020; Iodice et al. 2020)