TALK CANCELED–hope to reschedule fall 2014

Abstract
One of the great triumphs of modern astronomy has been the delineation of star formation and the build up of stellar mass through cosmic time. However, these studies reveal only the products of star formation, missing the cool gas, the fuel for star formation in galaxies. This situation has changed dramatically with the advent of revolutionary new facilities at cm through submm wavelengths, ALMA and the JVLA. I will review the current status of cool gas observations in distant galaxies, and present the latest results from ALMA and the JVLA. To date, molecular gas has been observed in close to 200 galaxies at z > 1. Studies have moved well beyond simple detections to dynamical imaging at kiloparsec-scale resolution and multiline, multispecies studies that determine the physical conditions in the ISM in early galaxies. Molecular line observations imply that the order of magnitude increase in the cosmic star-formation rate density from z ?? 0 to 2 is commensurate with a similar increase in the gas-to-stellar mass ratio in star-forming disk galaxies. Studies of atomic Fine Structure Line emission are rapidly progressing, with some tens of galaxies detected in the bright [CII] 158um line to date. The [CII] line is proving to be a unique tracer of galaxy dynamics in the early Universe, and has the potential to be the most direct means of obtaining spectroscopic redshifts for the first galaxies during cosmic
reionization.