RGZ team spotlight: Francesco de Gasperin

Meet Francesco de Gasperin, an associate science team member (since 2015) who is very interested in the classifications resulting from Radio Galaxy Zoo

I am a VENI fellow at the Leiden University in the Netherlands. My research is mainly based on developing and exploiting new technologies in radio-astronomy to study active galactic nuclei (AGN), galaxy clusters, galaxies and ultimately everything which emits radio waves. I am part of the LOFAR collaboration and most of my time is invested in the commissioning of this new radio-telescope. I am now leading the effort to calibrate the low band antennas of LOFAR to observe the sky at decameter wavelength. Our plan is to ultimately produce the lowest frequency radio survey ever done.

I did my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich on a thesis titled: “The impact of radio-emitting supermassive black holes on their environment: the LOFAR view of the Virgo cluster”. During my master I also worked for the Planck mission, a satellite designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the relic radiation from the Big Bang.

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What has Francesco and his student, Omar Contigiani  done lately ?

Is the orientation of radio galaxies totally random? Or is it driven by the large scale structure where galaxies are embedded in? Recently, some works on small regions of the sky claimed an intrinsic alignment of radio sources. This is in line with the observed alignment between quasar jets and the surrounding large scale structure at higher redshifts.

With the help of the RGZ we are now able to identify the orientation of a very large number of radio galaxies. This allows us to expand these studies to unprecedented scales, moving from regions of few square degrees to around 10 thousands.