English

The Evolution of Ellipticals, Spirals and Irregulars: Overcoming Selection Bias

Astrophysics 2009-10-31 v1

Abstract

The Hubble Deep Fields represent our best opportunity for probing galaxy evolution over a substantive look-back time. However as with any dataset the HDFs are prone to selection biases. These biases are extremely severe beyond z \~1.25 such that a meaningful interpretation of generic galaxy evolution is not possible. We can however extract well defined volume-limited samples at z < 1. The data are entirely consistent with passive/null-evolution for ellipticals, spirals and irregulars however this concluion is tempered by small number statistics. Alas stringent constraints on galaxy evolution await an order of magnitude increase in the number of HDFs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0012167,
  title  = {The Evolution of Ellipticals, Spirals and Irregulars: Overcoming Selection Bias},
  author = {Simon Driver},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0012167},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

To appear in Proc. of the ESO/ECF/STSCI workshop on Deep Fields, Garching Oct 2000, (Publ: Springer)