Related papers: The Premature Formation of High Redshift Galaxies
I review recent progress in understanding the formation of the first stars and quasars. The initial conditions for their emergence are given by the now firmly established model of cosmological structure formation. Numerical simulations of…
I review some recent progress made in our understanding of galaxy evolution and the cosmic history of star formation. Like bookends, the results obtained from deep ground-based spectroscopy and from the Hubble Deep Field imaging survey put…
How and when do galaxies form? Studies of the microwave background radiation reveal that the Universe is spectacularly homogenous at redshift z~1000. Observations of the local Universe reveal that by z=0 much of the luminous matter has…
Since the beginning of the new millennium, more than 100 $z\sim 6$ quasars have been discovered through several surveys and followed-up with multi-wavelength observations. These data provided a large amount of information on the growth of…
Observational constraints on the birth and early evolution of massive black holes (BHs) come from two extreme regimes. At high redshift, quasars signal the rapid growth of billion-solar-mass BHs and indicate that these objects began…
Herschel has opened new windows into studying the evolution of rapidly star-forming galaxies out to high redshifts. Today's massive starbursts are characterized by star formation rates (SFRs) of 100+ Mo/yr and display a chaotic morphology…
When galaxy formation started in the history of the Universe remains unclear. Studies of the cosmic microwave background indicate that the Universe, after initial cooling (following the Big Bang), was reheated and reionized by hot stars in…
The recent discoveries of luminous quasars at high redshifts imply that black holes more massive than a few billion solar masses have been assembled already when the universe was less than a billion years old. We show that the existence of…
We constrain the total accreted mass density in supermassive black holes at z>6, inferred via the upper limit derived from the integrated X-ray emission from a sample of photometrically selected galaxy candidates. Studying galaxies obtained…
The detection of black-hole binaries at high redshifts is a cornerstone of the science case of third-generation gravitational-wave interferometers. The star-formation rate peaks at z~2 and decreases by orders of magnitude by z~10. Any…
We present an analysis of $\sim$1500 H160-selected photometric galaxies detected to a limiting magnitude of 27.8 in the HUDF, using imaging from the HST WFC3/IR camera in combination with archival UV, optical, and NIR imaging. We fit…
I endeavour to provide a thorough overview of our current knowledge of high-redshift galaxies and their evolution during the first billion years of cosmic time, corresponding to redshifts z > 5. After first summarizing progress with the…
I review recent observations on the evolution of quasars, describe new surveys for quasars at z > 5 and for quasars at z > 3.3 down to luminosities corresponding to L* galaxies, and note the possible connection between the evolution of the…
We explore the evolved galaxy population in the proto-clusters around four high-z radio galaxies at 2<~z<~3 based on wide-field near-infrared imaging. Three of the four fields are known proto-clusters as demonstrated by overdensities of…
Massive galaxy clusters are now found as early as 3 billion years after the Big Bang, containing stars that formed at even earlier epochs. The high-redshift progenitors of these galaxy clusters, termed 'protoclusters', are identified in…
The Spitzer Space Telescope is devoting a significant fraction of the observing time to multi-wavelength cosmological surveys of different depths in various low-background sky regions. Several tens of thousand mid-IR galaxies have been…
According to the current understanding of cosmic structure formation, the precursors of the most massive structures in the Universe began to form shortly after the Big Bang, in regions corresponding to the largest fluctuations in the cosmic…
Understanding the formation history of massive galaxies is one of most popular and longstanding problems in astronomy, with observations and theory addressing how and when these systems assembled. Since the most massive galaxies in today's…
The first stars in the universe, forming at redshifts z>15 in minihalos with masses of order 10^6 Msun, may leave behind black holes as their remnants. These objects could conceivably serve as "seeds" for much larger black holes observed at…
Several conclusions have been reached over the last few years concerning high-redshift galaxies: (1) The excess of faint blue galaxies is due to dwarf galaxies. (2) Star formation peaks at redshifts z ~1-2. (3) It appears to occur piecemeal…