Galaxy formation and evolution

Abstract:

Encouraged by imaging of faint galaxies around bright stars using ALFA on the 3.5-m telescope at Calar Alto, we have begun a survey to identify a large number of candidate sources near bright stars. In this contribution we report the status of this survey and show our preliminary results from deep imaging around one of these stars during the early phases of CONICA and NAOS on the 8.2-m VLT. We outline the exciting prospects for this type of work in terms of number counts, morphology, and rotation curve analyses.

Abstract:

GalICS (for GALaxies In Cosmological Simulations) is a model of hierarchical galaxy formation which combines high resolution numerical simulations for the dark matter component with semi-analytic prescriptions for the baryonic matter. It provides us with an explicit cosmological framework to analyse observations of distant galaxies, and to understand how they evolve to become local galaxies. We use GalICS to build multi-wavelength mock galaxy catalogues which include clustering properties. We can compare them to the sample of Lyman Break Galaxies at z=3 ( Steidel et al., 1996), and to deep sub-mm surveys. The predictions of the model will be detailed, and show a good agreement with the available data.