Oral Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

The first galaxies: bright and faint (#87)

Michele Trenti 1
  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, United Kingdom

The search for the agents of reionization is elusive: While it is well established that the process is completed by redshift z~6 (and likely already at z~8-10), the observed population of galaxies at z>6 appears insufficient to even maintain the hydrogen ionized. Thus, the leading hypothesis is that the majority of star formation during the first billion years after the Big Bang was in elusive, small mass and very faint galaxies. In this context, I will show how searches for both bright and faint galaxies are needed to quantify accurately the galaxy luminosity function and star formation at z>8. I will present results on our search for the brightest of reionizing galaxies with the Hubble BoRG survey, as well as discuss how we can use GRBs host galaxy surveys at high-z to quantify star formation in faint dwarf galaxies that are beyond the direct reach of Hubble.

  1. Trenti et al. 2012, ApJL, 749, 38
  2. Trenti et al. 2011, ApJL, 727, 39
  3. Tacchella, Trenti & Carollo 2013, ApJL accepted, arxiv:1211.2825
  4. Bradley, Trenti et al. 2012, ApJ, 760, 108