the first galaxies

The First Two Billion Years of Galaxy Formation:
The Reionization Epoch and Beyond

Scientific Organizing Committee: Garth Illingworth (chair), Rychard Bouwens, Marijn Franx, Mauro Giavalisco, Guinevere Kauffmann, Simon White, Rosie Wyse

Scientific Rationale: Over the past years, we have made great strides in our ability to understand and to characterize the distant universe in its first two billion years. These advances have been made possible by the significant array of 8-10 meter class telescopes, large wide-area optical and near-infrared imagers, the Hubble Space Telescope, radio telescopes with kilometer long baselines, and a large array of other telescopes in space including Chandra, XMM, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Somewhat simultaneously, similar advances have been made in the computational arena, and now with the current generation of simulations we are able to simulate very large volumes of over 500h-1 Mpc on a side, with a mass resolution of ~1010 solar masses. All these advances have been extremely helpful for studies of early galaxy formation which require superb observational and computational tools, and now we are able to identify candidate galaxies out to redshifts as high as z~7-10 and study massive galaxies at z~2-3 in significant detail. The goal of this meeting was to bring together a large community of observers and theorists studying a wide range of different phenomena in high-redshift galaxies.

Presentations