Assigned ID: 410 ----- Submission 1 (Fri Jan 21 21:41:19 GMT 2005) ----- The last decade has seen the development of a basic observational framework for the evolution of galaxies with lookback time. From the timescales we observe it has become clear that galaxy morphology and star formation are interlinked; with the decrease in star formation at redshifts z<1 corresponding to the formation of the morphological sequence we know today. Given this simplified picture of galaxy evolution questions that arise are: what drives the evolution and how is it related to the environment? Is it a local phenomenon (depending simply on the mass of the dark matter halo) or are galaxy properties influenced by larger scale structures? Classical approaches to this problem involve subdividing samples of galaxies based on their observed properties (e.g. luminosity, color or morphology). While this provides some insight it does not fully exploit the information present within these data. We propose here to exploit a new set of clustering statistics, marked correlation functions, that can be used to express galaxy evolution in terms of the dark matter halo mass, the underlying large-scale environment and that can be compared directly to semi-analytic models for galaxy formation. Our goals with this proposal are: (a) to utilize archival multicolor HST data to derive a statistically robust sample of galaxies from which to study the properties of galaxies at intermediate and high redshift (0.5<z<2); (b) to measure the marked correlation functions for these samples as a function of luminosity, color and morphology; (c) to relate these marked correlation functions to models for galaxy formation (from semi-analytic models to dark matter halo distributions); (d) to compare the marked correlation functions from local surveys with the high redshift data to determine whether the physical processes that drive evolution in the local universe dominate at earlier times.

COSMOLOGY 12 89000 false 0.0 false false false false false SUPPORTED