Francesco Santoro

Team Member Profile: Francesco Santoro

Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, MPIA Heidelberg

Personal webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/francescosantoro/home

I am interested in the life cycle of gas in galaxies, going from the Diffuse Ionised Gas (DIG) component in star-forming spiral galaxies to the interaction between the AGN and the surrounding ISM in elliptical galaxies.

Role in PHANGS: I’m a builder member of the PHANGS collaboration which I joined in late 2018. Since then I’ve been working extensively on the data reduction of the PHANGS-MUSE sample especially helping with pipeline development/testing and with coordination of the data reduction team. I’m also passionate about data visualization, I designed the PHANGS logo and made many of the images/videos that you can see on the PHANGS website.

In terms of science I'm using the wealth of multiwavelength data available in PHANGS to study the properties of HII regions, the DIG component and low-luminosity AGN in the galaxies of our sample.

Image showing all the nebulae, and among them the HII regions, found in the MUSE Halpha emission line map of NGC4535 (left panel) and their spatial clustering (right panel). This shows one of the first steps in the process of building an HII region catalogue for this galaxy.