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Purdue University

"The Varied Fates of Galaxies in the Young Universe"

Thursday February 07, 2013

4:00pm phys203

Refreshments are served at 3:30 p.m. in Physics room 242

High-redshift galaxies, observed in the first several billion years after the Big Bang, are thought to be the present-day galaxies at their infancy. Hence, constraining the formation and evolution of high-redshift galaxies is key to understanding the assembly history of our own Milky Way as well as of the galaxies in our own backyard. Recently, significant progress has been made in characterizing key statistics of high-redshift galaxies; their number densities and spatial auto-correlation as a function of mass and luminosity. However, a more detailed understanding of the star-formation, assembly and chemical histories of the galaxies has been more difficult to obtain. We are still unable to translate these “global” measures into a comprehensive physical picture and to address fundamental questions on the physical processes driving galaxy evolution: What drives star formation? What is the typical star formation history (SFH) of a galaxy, does it depend on luminosity/mass? Do more luminous galaxies have different physical properties (ages, metallicity, SFH, kinematics) than their less-luminous counterparts? In this talk, I will review recent progress in our understanding of high-redshift galaxy formation, and discuss observational evidence that strongly suggest that galaxies have very different evolutionary paths, which depend primarily on where they are born, i.e., dark matter halo environments.