UC Berkeley

Galaxies, as the fundamental building blocks of the Universe, are the critical link between the overall evolution of the Universe and the assembly of small-scale structures, such as stars and planets, within it. Unfortunately, the formation and evolution of galaxies remains poorly understood, due to the incredible complexity of the physics that governs these processes. To study and constrain these processes, a particularly useful galaxy population are bulge-dominated galaxies such as elliptical and large spiral galaxies, which together are the most massive and most evolved components of the local Universe. In the present day, these galaxies are dominated by old stars; however, their histories likely include an epoch of powerful star formation and rapid growth of their supermassive black holes.

Progress in understanding the evolution of massive galaxies can therefore proceed on two fronts -- 1) observations of their formation in situ in the early Universe, and 2) detailed studies of the fossil relics of this process in the local Universe -- with the ultimate goal being to link progenitors and descendants. A key epoch for such investigations is 10 billion years ago, the most active period in the Universe's history, at which time the vast majority of stellar material in galaxies was assembled. Recent comparisons of the observed properties of galaxy populations across cosmic time have shown that the dominant star-forming galaxy population at these early times were the probable ancestors of present-day massive (bulge-dominated spiral and elliptical) galaxies. The obvious direction for current and future research is therefore to probe the detailed evolution with time of the properties and sub-structures that define this local galaxy population.

This goal has guided my dissertation research, as described in the following pages. Using photometric, spectroscopic, and integral-field observations at optical through mid-infrared wavelengths, I have studied both star-forming galaxies in the early Universe and their present-day descendants. Specifically, this thesis explores the dynamical, star-forming, and black hole properties of galaxies 10 billion years ago and shows that these young galaxies must be assembled via a rapid but steady influx of gas from the surrounding cosmic structure. The resulting large quantity of gas in these galaxies causes super-large star-forming gas clouds to form, and the dynamical interactions of these clouds control the evolution of the galaxies' supermassive black holes and internal sub-structures, producing the bulges and globular cluster populations observed in the present day. Studies of the resulting local massive galaxy population, also presented herein, confirm that such successive minor dynamical disturbances were important to the assembly of these bulge-dominated galaxies and their supermassive black holes. In the pages of this thesis, an exciting link is emerging in which many observed properties of local galaxies can be explained by the dramatic internal processes occurring in galaxies 10 billion years ago, during the era of the most rapid galaxy assembly.