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E. F. Bell (MPIA, Heidelberg), C. Wolf (Oxford), D. H. McIntosh (UMass), COMBO-17 Team, GEMS Collaboration
The evolution of massive early-type galaxies offers one of the clearest tests of galaxy models in a hierarchical CDM Universe, owing to the ongoing assembly of massive haloes. We use the 17 passband 25000-galaxy COMBO-17 photometric redshift survey in conjunction with the quarter square degree GEMS HST ACS mosaic to place unique and powerful constraints on the evolution of massive early-type galaxies to the present day.
Highlights include the following: a bimodal rest-frame color distribution, where blue galaxies are primarily late-type and red galaxies primarily early-type, as in the local Universe; a factor of two evolution in total stellar mass in early-type galaxies from z ~1 to the present day; and a detection of the Butcher-Oemler effect in the lease dense environments, indicating that the Butcher-Oemler effect may have little to do with cluster-centric processes such as harassment or ram-pressure stripping, rather being driven by mechanisms such as merging or gas consumption which can also operate in low-density environments.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: bell@mpia.de
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.