Hubble Space Telescope Study of Massive and Evolved Galaxies at High Redshift

Before the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), with its unprecedented resolution and the introduction of the largest ground-based observatories with their immense light collecting capabilities, the study of the most distant objects in the Universe was very limited or impossible. The Hubble Space Telescope made it possible to not only find the most distant objects in the Universe but to also understand their physical properties in detail. The detailed spectroscopic observations by the largest ground based telescopes (such as the W. M. Keck 10 meter telescope) opened up new possibilities for studying galaxy evolution and formation back to only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. In this talk I will be presenting results on the discovery of a population of massive and evolved galaxies at only a few hundred million years after the BigBang, identified with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope and confirmed with spectroscopy from the Keck 10m telescopes.

Hooshang Nayyeri

I was born in the city of Tehran/Iran. I got my BS in the field of Physics from Sharif University of Technology in 2008 after which I moved to the US to continue my studies. I got my MS in Physics in the Winter of 2011 and my PhD in Astrophysics in Summer 2014 working under the supervision of Prof. Bahram Mobasher on the nature of Massive and Evolved Galaxies at high redshift using the HST and Keck data. I have been working as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Irvine since Fall 2014.

"What's Up?" in this month will be presented by Chris Butler