Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published 1995 | public
Book Section - Chapter

The Morphological Evolution of Field Galaxies

Abstract

I review two observational programs which, together, promise to unravel the detailed astrophysical evolution of normal field galaxies over the last 5–7 Gyr. Systematic ground-based spectroscopy of faint galaxies have revealed an increasing faint end slope for the luminosity function with red-shift. The trend is strongest for galaxies undergoing intense star-formation. Deep images taken with the repaired HST can be used to count galaxies as a function of morphological type. Regular "Hubble sequence" galaxies follow the no-evolution prediction, but irregular/peculiar sources have a steeper count slope and provide the excess population. Although the overlap between the spectral and HST samples is currently small, plans to merge similar datasets should reveal the physical explanation for the demise of star formation in faint blue galaxies since z ≃0.5–1.

Additional Information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1995. The Autofib survey involves Matthew Colless, Tom Broadhurst, Jeremy Heyl and Karl Glazebrook and the Medium Deep Survey is led by Richard Griffiths. I thank all co-workers for allowing me to present data prior publication. I acknowledge financial support from the IAU and the assistance of Jacqueline Bergeron and Piet van der Kruit.

Additional details

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