Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
The MUSE view of the Sculptor galaxy
Enrico Congiu (ESO Chile)
Thursday 19/06/2025 @ 11:30, Sala Antonio Sollima (IV piano Battiferro)
High spatial resolution integral field observations of nearby galaxies revolutionized the field of galaxy evolution in the last decade. They allowed us to move from studying galaxies as single objects to investigating separtely the multitude of their building blocks (e.g., H II regions, molecular clouds, star clusters). However, most physical processes take place at small scales (~10 pc or less) that are difficult to resolve while keeping a complete view of the targeted system. In this context, we recently completed a 51 hours (20x5 arcmin2) MUSE@VLT mosaic covering NGC 253, the Sculptor galaxy. With a distance of ~3.5 Mpc, NGC 253 is the closest massive starburst galaxy to the Milky Way and it offers us the possibility to study a wide variety of phenomena with a resolution of ~15 pc/", sufficient to resolve most of the ~5000 star-forming regions that are included in the mosaic (which extend up to 0.75* r_25). In this talk, I will present the data and the preliminary results of the projects carried on by the PHANGS collaboration based on this dataset.