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

A first glimpse into the complete galaxy population 12 billion years ago (#86)

Lee Spitler 1
  1. Australian Astronomical Observatory / Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia

Traditional optical searches for distant galaxies has yielded large samples of star-forming galaxies. Unfortunately, these searches were not sensitive to old or dusty distant galaxies and so our knowledge about galaxies in the early Universe was not complete. Using deep infrared imaging products from the ZFOURGE survey, we are now able to look at the complete distant galaxy population and study the evolutionary relationships between star-forming, old and dusty galaxies ~12 billion light years ago. I will present the first unbiased glimpse into the redshift z=3-4 galaxy population and show that large numbers of massive dusty and old galaxies existed very early in the Universe.