ESO Science Release | VISTA | 2015 Nov 18
VISTA pinpoints earliest giant galaxies
[img3="Massive Galaxies Discovered in the Early UniverseESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.
Credit: ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU"]http://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1545a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
Just counting the number of galaxies in a patch of sky provides a way to test astronomers’ theories of galaxy formation and evolution. However, such a simple task becomes increasingly hard as astronomers attempt to count the more distant and fainter galaxies. It is further complicated by the fact that the brightest and easiest galaxies to observe — the most massive galaxies in the Universe — are rarer the further astronomers peer into the Universe’s past, whilst the more numerous less bright galaxies are even more difficult to find. ...
UltraVISTA has been imaging the same patch of sky, nearly four times the size of a full Moon, since December 2009. This is the largest patch of sky ever imaged to these depths at infrared wavelengths. The team combined these UltraVISTA observations with those from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, which probes the cosmos at even longer, mid-infrared wavelengths. ...
Spitzer bright, UltraVISTA faint sources in COSMOS: the contribution
to the overall population of massive galaxies at z=3-7 - K. I. Caputi et al
- Astrophysical Journal 810(1):73 (2015 Sep 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/810/1/73
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1505.05721 > 21 May 2015 (v1), 25 Aug 2015 (v3)