NRAO/Socorro Colloquium Series: 02 November 2001

Andrew Hopkins

University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania


Galaxy evolution: The last 10 billion years


Understanding galaxy evolution over the lifetime of the Universe is an extraordinarily complex undertaking. A comprehensive picture must necessarily include an investigation of star formation processes in galaxies and how they affect galaxy development and morphology. The redshift range 1 ~< z ~< 2 marks an era in which galaxies experience probably the most rapid period of star-formation in their evolution and it also sees strong morphological evolution in galaxies. A decline of almost an order of magnitude is seen in the space density of galaxy SFRs for 0 < z ~< 1. Part of the complexity in deriving a coherent understanding of galaxy evolution arises from the heterogeneous nature of the many surveys required to probe a cosmologically significant redshift range, and importantly for studies of star-formation, the unknown extent of dust obscuration at different redshifts. These difficulties are being addressed through the use of complementary multiwavelength ground- and space-based observations. Star-formation over 0 < z ~< 1 is being probed by an ongoing large area radio survey, the Phoenix Deep Survey, supplemented by multicolor optical, near-infrared and spectroscopic ground-based observations. This investigation is complemented by high redshift studies with HST to develop a coherent picture of galaxy evolution spanning the full range 0 < z ~< 2, corresponding approximately to a 10 billion year lookback time in a (H_0, Omega_M, Omega_L)=(75,0.3,0.7) cosmology. The status of existing observations and analysis will be presented, along with the direction and areas of subsequent inquiry.






Friday, 02 November 2001
11:00am

Array Operations Center Auditorium

Local Host: Chris Carilli


Other NRAO/Socorro colloquia


cchandle@nrao.edu