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Session 14 - Surveys.
Display session, Monday, January 13
Metropolitan Ballroom,
A large collaboration at Caltech has been using the Keck and other telescopes to perform UBVRIKL imaging and take spectra of faint galaxies. The spectroscopic samples contain several hundred objects to K=20 mag or R=24 mag and the imaging samples contain thousands of sources to R\approx 27. Faint field galaxies are found to be strongly clustered in velocity space; the angular coherence, masses and morphologies in configuration space of these structures are investigated. In cooperation with the University of Hawaii group, the luminosity function of galaxies is computed in the near-infrared; strong evolution is found in the number of low-luminosity galaxies to z\approx 1, although the statistical properties of high-luminosity objects are relatively constant. A range of models for the faint galaxy counts are constructed, not on the basis of a priori information about galaxy properties (from, say, cosmogonic theory) but rather by ``inverting'' the data under a range of qualitatively distinct simplifying assumptions. Predictions are made for ongoing or future imaging and spectroscopy surveys which will clearly distinguish the models. The prospects for a ``meta-analysis'' of a large collection of heterogeneous surveys to create consistent galaxy evolution models from z=0 to the highest observed redshifts are discussed.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: hogg@tapir.caltech.edu
