The HST GOODS NICMOS Survey: The Formation of Massive Galaxies

Details The HST GOODS NICMOS Survey: The Formation of Massive Galaxies The HST GOODS NICMOS Survey: The Formation of Massive Galaxies

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21743022b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #430.22; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The GOODS NICMOS Survey is a large Hubble Space Telescope survey which images 1/6 the area of the total GOODS fields in the near infrared (H-band). It obtains unprecedented depth and area coverage, centering its 180 orbits (and 60 pointings) around the most massive galaxies in the Universe at z 1.5 - 3. At these redshifts we observe rest-frame optical light and can therefore resolve to relatively high resolution the established stellar populations of massive galaxies at very early times in the Universe's history. We present the major merger histories of these massive galaxies, finding that the fraction of merging massive galaxies rises monotonically with redshift out to at least z 3. Furthermore, we also investigate the size evolution of massive galaxies noting that massive galaxies at high redshifts were substantially smaller in effective radii, for their stellar masses, than local galaxies. We observe that the major merger fraction for massive galaxies drops by an order of magnitude from z = 3 to the present, during which time the sizes of these objects grow by up to a factor of 5. This creates a paradox in which galaxies grow most when merging and interacting the least. We offer a tentative solution to this apparent mystery by evoking a potent mix of AGN feedback and minor mergers. This research was funded my the STFC and NASA/STSci grant HST-GO11082.

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