Empirical Measurements of Massive Galaxy and Active Galaxy Evolution

Abstract

Using new wide-area galaxy redshift surveys, we explore the evolutionof the most massive galaxies and the most luminous quasars in the universe over much of cosmic history. Quasars and massive red galaxies both areextremes; the most luminous high redshift quasars likely play a key role in shaping their nearby environment and the universe as a whole. The mostmassive galaxies represent the end points of galaxy evolution and containa fossil record of the galaxy evolution process.Using the AGES redshift survey completed with the MMT and the Hectospecmulti-object spectrograph as well as new $z$-band observations of the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey Bootes field, we report the discovery of threenew quasars at z>5. We explore new mid-infrared selection in light of thesethree new quasars and place constraints on the slope of the high-redshiftquasar luminosity function.At lower redshift (0.12.2L*), we find that the scatter around the color-magnitude relation is quite small in colors studied.Each of three model star formation histories can reproduce the scatter we measure, none of the models producecolor distributions matching those observed.We measure the evolution of the LRG luminosity function in the redshift range 0.13L*)red galaxies have grown by less than 50% (at 99% confidence) since z=0.9 in stark contrast to the factor of 2 to 4 growth observed in the L* red galaxy population over the same epoch.Finally, we introduce the PRIsm MUlti-object Survey (PRIMUS), a new redshiftsurvey aimed at collecting ~300,000 galaxy spectra over 10 sq. deg toz~1. We summarize the current status of PRIMUS observations and datareductions and present several survey statistics. PRIMUS is the largestexisting redshift survey at intermediate redshift and holds the largestsample of redshifts for Spitzer and X-ray detected objects.