Related papers: HDF: Introduction and Motivation
As astronomers, we are living an exciting time for what concerns the search for other worlds. Recent discoveries have already deeply impacted our vision of planetary formation and architectures. Future bio-signature discoveries will…
Investigating the link between supermassive black hole and galaxy evolution requires careful measurements of the properties of the host galaxies. We perform simulations to test the reliability of a two-dimensional image-fitting technique to…
We explore the nature of the evolution of faint field galaxies by assuming that the local luminosity function is not well defined. We use a non-negative least squares technique to derive a near optimal set of local luminosity functions for…
Galactic bulges are central to understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Here we report on recent studies using micro-lensing events to obtain spectra of high resolution and moderately high signal-to-noise ratios of dwarf stars in the…
Results from a recent HST survey of field galaxies at wavelengths 1600 Angstroms and 2400 Angstroms are be presented. The data are used to constrain the fraction of Lyman-continuum radiation that escapes from galaxies at redshifts z ~ 1.…
We constrain the evolution of the galaxy mass and luminosity functions from the analysis of (public) multi-wavelength data in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) area, obtained from the GOODS and other projects, and including very deep…
Measurement of the gravitational distortion of images of distant galaxies is rapidly becoming established as a powerful probe of the dark mass distribution in clusters of galaxies. With the advent of large mosaics of CCD's these methods…
Pure luminosity evolution models for galaxies provide an unacceptable fit to the redshifts and colors of faint galaxies. In this paper we demonstrate, using HST morphological number counts derived both from the $I_{814}$-band of WFPC2 in…
The optical luminosity function is a fundamental characterization of the galaxy population. A combination of earlier redshift surveys with two new surveys allows the first accurate determination of the evolution of the luminosity function…
The direct images of giant extrasolar planets recently obtained around several main sequence stars represent a major step in the study of planetary systems. These high-dynamic range images are among the most striking results obtained by the…
Galaxies undergoing formation and evolution can now be observed over a time baseline of some 12 Gyr. An inherent difficulty with high-redshift observations is that the objects are very faint and the best resolution (HST) is only ~0.5 kpc.…
Deep imaging, that is imaging capable of capturing very low surface brightness extended objects, is a quickly growing field of extragalactic astronomy. Not only can new types of faint objects be discovered, but deep images of bright…
These are advanced lecture notes covering recent developments in the methodology used to analyse galaxy surveys. The focus is particularly on direct measurements of the galaxy power spectrum although I also discuss its Fourier transform,…
We describe here the reduction methods that we developed to study the faintest red dwarfs and white dwarfs in an outer field of NGC6397, which was observed by \hst for 126 orbits in 2005. The particular challenge of this data set is that…
[Abridged] The environment where galaxies are found heavily influences their evolution. Close groupings, like the cores of galaxy clusters or compact groups, evolve in ways far more dramatic than their isolated counterparts. We have…
Both theoretical and observational lines of reasoning suggest that the very faint (B > 24) galaxies seen in deep images of the sky are small low-mass galaxies that experienced starburst at 0.5<z<1 and have since faded into low luminosity,…
This chapter provides an in-depth overview of white dwarfs, the evolutionary terminus of the vast majority of stars. It discusses their discovery, their nature as degenerate objects, their connections to earlier phases of stellar evolution,…
Studies of deep photometry of galaxies have presented discoveries of excess light in surface-brightness and colour profiles at large radii in the form of diffuse faint haloes and thick discs. In a majority of the cases, it has seemed…
We use the deep ground-based optical photometry of the Lyman Break Galaxy (LBG) Survey to derive robust measurements of the faint-end slope (alpha) of the UV LF at redshifts 1.9<z<3.4. Our sample includes >2000 spectroscopic redshifts and…
As the first paper in a series on the study of the galaxy-galaxy lensing from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7), we present our image processing pipeline that corrects the systematics primarily introduced by the Point…