Assigned ID: 587 ----- Submission 1 (Sat Jan 22 00:12:02 GMT 2005) ----- Galaxy mergers are expected to play a critical role in the formation of massive red spheroids, feeding active galactic nuclei, and triggering dust-enshrouded starbursts. Current cosmologically-motivated models of galaxy evolution fail to produce enough red bulge-dominated galaxies at early and late times as well as the dust-enshrouded populations of luminous infrared galaxies at z ~ 2. It is likely that these failures are due to our poor understanding of the physics associated with mergers. We propose a multi-wavelength archival study to identify mergers, classify merger type and stage, and determine their AGN and starburst activity out to z ~ 2 in the Extended Groth Strip, GOODS, and UDF. Morphology is the most accessible signature of a galaxy merger, but the classification of z > 1 galaxy morphologies from optical ACS data is challenging because of the increasingly irregular appearance of normal galaxies at rest-frame ultraviolet wavelengths. The core of our program is the analysis and comparison of NIC2/3 derived morphologies and merger-fractions for > 200 merger candidates to those derived with ACS in order to constrain the effect of wavelength on morphologically-derived merger rates and to calibrate the large ACS Legacy data-sets for which high-resolution NIR data is not available. With the rich multi-wavelength data in our selected fields (Spitzer, Chandra, VLA), we will also be able classify our merger candidates as major or minor, gas-rich or gas-poor, and early or late-stage using the HST quantitative morphologies, IR luminosities and other star-formation indicators. Finally, we will correlate our merger candidates with the presence of X-ray selected AGN to better understand the role of mergers in feeding AGN and the bulge-massive black hole correlation.

GALAXIES 12 100000 1 year post-doc salary plus benefits false 0.0 false false false false false SUPPORTED