Studies of Distant Galaxies

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The properties of galaxies at distances of many billions of light years are to be investigated. Such galaxies are seen as they were at earlier stages of evolution and may reveal evolutionary effects. Moreover, the curvature of the universe expands the apparent sizes of galaxy images to a detectable degree if the distance is great enough. Progress in this field has been difficult because evolutionary, selection, and cosmological effects may be similar in appearance, and the accidental measurement errors of such faint sources may be large. The existence of large-scale structure in the universe provides a rich new field for study, but complicates the definition of statistically fair samples. The studies will feature the ultimate use of all practically accessible information for complete samples of distant galaxies, including the morphology and the internal kinematics. The methodology will be explored first by making observations of nearby galaxies. One telescope will be instrumented with an array detector sensitive to near-infrared light, and another telescope will be instrumented with an optical spectrograph. The observations, carried out with large telescopes to observe distant galaxies, will involve the use of the same infrared array detector for the purpose of making precise photometric measurements. An ongoing very faint redshift survey will be expanded to map out large-scale structure in the universe at the greatest accessible distances.