Gravitational lensing is allowing us to access physical scales and
luminosities in the distant Universe with unprecedented accuracy,
offering the opportunity to infer key physical quantities otherwise
unaccessible without AO. While such scientific programs are somehow
propaedeutic, AO technology coupled with cosmic telescopes will project
astronomers into a new territory. I'll present...
Environmental effects play a primary role in galaxy evolution and in
particular in shaping the star formation history of galaxies in groups
and even more so in dense environments.
The MUSE IFU has allowed to study in detail how environmental effects
act in shaping galaxy properties, its limitation being essentially the
spatial resolution that can be reached using...
The selection of passive galaxies in the early (z>3) Universe is very challenging, and crucial to constrain theoretical modelling of the processes responsible for their rapid assembly and abrupt shut-down of the star formation. I will describe the careful selection method which we developed to single out quiescent galaxies at high z in the CANDELS fields. I will present the resulting sample of...
Despite the limitations in terms of sky coverage and corrections, current AO facilities are providing a unique, high spatial resolution view of AGNs and their hosts. After presenting some examples of the results obtained, I will discuss the unsolved issues that will be tackled by the advent of the new generation IR and optical AO fed Integral Field Spectrographs, ERIS and MAVIS at VLT.
Relic galaxies, low-redshift old compact massive galaxies, are thought to be local counterparts of red and quiescent compact massive galaxies at high-z (the so called "red nuggets"), that missed the channels of galaxy size growth and evolved undisturbed since their first mass assembly. Therefore, they represent the perfect laboratories to study the mass assembly in the early universe through...
The blast wave of young supernova remnant are often associated with Balmer emission produced by the excitation of neutral Hydrogen in the ISM by shocked ions. The resulting Balmer lines contain information on the shock structure, in particular connected to the plasma temperature, speed, ionization fraction and turbulence level. If the same shock accelerate efficiently cosmic rays (CRs), the...
