Probing Galaxy Evolution By Unveiling The Structure Of Massive Galaxies Across Cosmic Time And In Diverse Environments

Awarded the AAS Rodger Doxsey Travel Prize, with a foreword by supervisor Professor Shardha Jogee at the University of Texas at Austin. How galaxies form and evolve is one of the primary outstanding problems in extragalactic astronomy. It is clear that galaxies consist of two fundamental kinds of structure: flat, rotationally supported disk-dominated components and puffy, dynamically hot bulges/ellipticals supported by random stellar motions.

Our picture of how and at what rate, these two kinds of structures are assembled is being actively studied and revisited. An important research goal is to understand the relative importance of the different mechanisms (galaxy collisions, gas accretion and internal rearrangement of matter) that assemble and shape galaxies.

This work makes an empirical census of galaxy structure by targeting galaxies at different epochs of cosmic time, as well as in environments of low to extremely high galaxy number density. A striking result of this work is that disk-dominated components are far more prevalent in some regimes than previously thought and this raises important challenges for current theoretical models of galaxy formation.