Astrophysics Colloquium

Abstract:
Owing to large surveys such as the 3D-HST Treasury program we now have high resolution snapshots of the Universe over most of its history. The challenge now is to use this wealth of data to figure out how galaxies assembled, and what physical processes drove their evolution. The talk will highlight recent results on the evolution of galaxies with the present-day mass of the Milky Way and higher, linking galaxies across cosmic time by their number density. We find that the most massive galaxies were assembled in a very different way than Milky Way-like galaxies, which may explain their different present-day morphologies and their apparently different stellar initial mass functions.