Why wait? Wide-area Imaging & Spectroscopy Surveys for Galaxy Evolution with the Hubble Space Telescope

by Dr Gabriel Brammer

Tuesday 15 Sept 2020, 13:15 → 14:15 Europe/Stockholm

Fysikum equipment

Many of the recent discoveries in studies of early galaxy evolution have come from deep observations with the Hubble Space telescope, surveying small, "pencil-beam" areas of the sky.  Over the next decade, the Euclid and WFIRST space missions will open a new frontier of a complete view of the distant universe observed over a significant fraction of the visible sky.  Considering the entirety its archival data holdings, today Hubble has observed more than 3 square degrees of near-infrared imaging and more than 1.5 square degrees with slitless spectroscopy that together can already provide and can already provide a synthetic and comprehensive understanding of distant galaxies that would otherwise have to wait for the next generation future space telescopes.  Together these observations today can probe populations of relatively rare objects that are key signposts for understanding how galaxies form and evolve, such as the most massive, evolved galaxies at intermediate redshifts and the most luminous galaxies at the epoch of cosmic dawn only a short time after the Big Bang.