The forwards approach to galaxy formation and evolution is extremely powerful but leaves several questions unanswered. Foremost among these is the origin of disks. A backwards approach is able to provide a more realistic treatment of star formation and feedback and provides a practical guide to eventually complement galaxy formation ab initio.

We study the evolution of disk galaxies within the frame of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmologies. The hydrodynamics of a centrifugally supported gaseous disk and the growth of a stellar disk is calculated in detail taking into account the energy balance of the ISM and the gravitational instabilities that concern gas and stars. The halo density profile is derived from the primordial cosmologic...

The Spitzer Space Telescope is devoting a significant fraction of the observing time to multi-wavelength cosmological surveys of different depths in various low-background sky regions. Several tens of thousand mid-IR galaxies have been detected over a wide interval of redshifts. A progressively clearer picture of galaxy evolution is emerging, which emphasizes populations of luminous galaxies at...

We use population synthesis to construct distributions of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) for different proposed progenitor models. We use a description of star formation that takes into account the evolution of metallicity with redshift and galaxy mass, the evolution of galaxy mass with redshift, and the star formation rate with galaxy mass and redshift. We compare predicted distributions with redshif...

Star formation history shows a gradual decline since the last 8-9 Gyr (z=1). The bulk of present-day stellar mass and metal content was formed at red-shifts lower than 2-3, which is consistent with a hierarchical scenario of galaxy formation. Observations of galaxy evolution during the last 2/3 of the Universe age could be done in great details, and provide numerous insights on the origin of th...

The Gemini Deep Deep Survey, GDDS, produced several significant results relating to the evolution of galaxies. All of these results are consistent with the “downsizing” concept of galaxy formation and evolution, i.e., that the active periods of star formation moved progressively from very massive galaxies at high redshift to much lower mass galaxies at the present epoch. Spectra of massive red ...

We present a numerical study of the evolution of galaxy clustering when galaxies flow passively from high redshift, respecting the continuity equation throughout. While passive flow is a special case of galaxy evolution, it allows a well-defined study of galaxy ancestry and serves as an interesting limit to be compared to non-passive cases. We use dissipationless N-body simulations, assign gala...

The number of rich galaxy clusters per unit volume is a strong function of , the cosmological density parameter, and 8 , the linear extrapolation to z = 0 of the density contrast in 8h ?1 Mpc spheres. The CNOC cluster redshift survey provides a sample of clusters whose average mass prooles are accurately known, which enables a secure association between cluster numbers and the ltered density pe...

Strong cluster eccentricity evolution for z ≤ 0.13 has appeared in a variety of observational data sets. We examine the evolution of eccentricity in simulated galaxy clusters using a variety of simulation methodologies, amplitude normalizations, and background cosmologies. We do not find find significant evolution for z < 0.1 in any of our simulation ensembles. We suggest a systematic error in ...

Deep multi-color galaxy surveys with photometric redshifts will provide a large number of twopoint correlation observables: galaxy-galaxy angular correlations, galaxy-shear cross correlations, and shear-shear correlations between all redshifts. These observables can potentially enable a joint determination of the dark energy dependent evolution of the dark matter and distances as well as the re...