Understanding the formation and evolution of disk galaxies remains one of the most intriguing and unsolved problems in cosmology. Despite the steady improvement in the number and quality of observations over the last decade, a clear consensus about the evolution of disks has not been reached. Using wide field data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey, we examine the size and surface brightness evolution of approximately 20,000 disk galaxies from z = 0.2 to z = 1. This is the largest. sample size of high-redshift disk measurements to date. We perform two dimensional bulge+disk decompositions on all objects in the fields and select only those that are highly disk dominated. The size function of these disks shows that the distribution of sizes is unchanged over this redshift interval. Examination of various models of pure luminosity evolution show that there has been 0.5 +0.1 magnitudes of evolution over the redshift range 0.4 < z < 1.0 and 1.5 ± 0.3 magnitudes of evolution over 0.2 < z < 1.0. This is mostly consistent with passive evolution and suggests that disks were assembled prior to z = 1.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/2113 |
| Date | 26 January 2010 |
| Creators | Kanwar, Anudeep Kaur |
| Contributors | Simard, Luc, Ellison, Sara L. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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