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Published 1996 | public
Book Section - Chapter

HST Observations of Giant Arcs

Abstract

We discuss HST imaging of eight spectroscopically-confirmed giant arcs, pairs and arclets. Although our HST observations include both pre- and post-refurbishment images, the depth of the exposures guarantees that the majority of the arcs are detected with diffraction-limited resolution. We present the size information on these distant field galaxies in the light of HST studies of lower redshift samples. We suggest that the dominant population of star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 1 is a factor of 1.5–2 times smaller in size than the equivalent population in the local field. This implies either a considerable evolution in the sizes of star-forming galaxies within the last ∼10 Gyrs or a shift in the relative space densities of massive and dwarf star-forming systems over the same time scale.

Additional Information

© 1996 International Astronomical Union. We thank Roger Blandford, Bernard Fort, David Hogg, Yannick Mellier and Jordi Miralda-Escude for useful discussions. We also wish to thank Dr. S. Mutz for providing the data from his HST study. Support via a Carnegie Fellowship, Space Telescope Grant GO-05352 and an IAU Travel Grant are gratefully acknowledged. The observations presented here were obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
January 14, 2024