Massive Galaxies in the Early Universe

Pieter van Dokkum, , ,

Using very deep near-infrared surveys from the ground and from space we have recently identified a large population of red galaxies in the early Universe. These objects emit most of their radiation in the rest-frame optical, which is redshifted to the near-infrared for redshifts z>2, and are very faint in the rest-frame ultraviolet. The image shows an example of this type of object in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest image of the sky ever taken. This distant galaxy looks remarkably similar to the large nearby spiral galaxy M31, which is shown at the same physical scale and rest-frame wavelengths. In the context of the Yale/Chile survey we have measured the luminosity function, clustering, and spectra of these newly discovered galaxies.