THE FRONTIERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN THE NORTH ECLIPTIC POLE: A 10 SQUARE-DEGREE SURVEY TO MAP THE GROWTH OF STELLAR MASS IN GALAXIES ACROSS 10 BILLION YEARS
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2024
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This dissertation completed the deepest survey spanning UV/optical to mid-infrared wavelengths over an area of ten square-degrees or more to date. Specifically, this survey targeted the widest and deepest field ever observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope in the northern sky, Euclid Deep Field North (EDF-N), located in the North Ecliptic Pole. Deep ultraviolet imaging (u < 26.2 mag) from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and deep optical imaging from the Subaru telescope (griz < 27 mag) was acquired over the entire area. These data were combined with similarly deep imaging from a two square-degree region in the southern sky, Euclid Deep Field Fornax. Over six million galaxies were detected from these fields, and their photometry was measured using new tools developed as part of this work designed to self-consistently measure the flux across wide ranges of resolution and wavelength. Their redshifts and stellar masses were measured using two independent modeling codes and validated using an external reference catalog. Finally, these galaxies were used to measure the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function, the number of galaxies per unit co-moving volume as a function of stellar mass, over a ten billion year time period (0.2 < z < 6.5). The unique volume of this dataset samples over cosmologically representative structure, providing new insight into the growth of stellar mass in galaxies.
In addition to identifying the single largest sample of massive galaxies (M >10^10.5 Msun) above z > 3, three main results are obtained:(1) The observed abundance of massive galaxies at 3.5 < z < 6.5, 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang, requires that feedback mechanisms capable of regulating star-formation at late times are inefficient in the early universe;
(2) The majority of massive quiescent galaxies are already formed by z ~ 3, two billion years after the Big Bang, and the increase in number density of such galaxies across the next 9 billion years is insubstantial;
(3) For the first time, the environment (i.e., local density) is shown to influence the galaxy stellar mass function as early as z ~3.5, with massive galaxies being more frequently embedded within high-density environments.
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473 pages
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