CTIO  > Science Talks  >  Abstracts

 

Nelson Padilla
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
& NOAO South Visiting Astronomer
 


"The Evolution of Early-type Galaxies Selected by Their Spatial Clustering"
 

I will present a method to select descendants of high redshift galaxies, motivated in results from numerical simulations.  If the number density and clustering amplitude of a sample of galaxies is known, these can be matched to a population of dark-matter haloes at the same redshift in EPS theory or numerical simulations.  The latter can be followed to lower redshifts, where the properties of the descendant population can be inferred.  The observational sample that shares this properties at this new redshift can be considered as statistical descendants of the higher z sample.  Applying this method to ETG galaxies in the
MUSYC survey, we find that between z=1 and 0, these galaxies undergo ~1-4 mergers with little star formation activity.