Event Details

Studies of galaxy formation and evolution have made remarkable progress in the past two decades. Thanks to modern telescopes, such as HST,Keck, Spitzer, and SDSS, the integrated properties of distant galaxies -- mass, size, color, and shape -- have been accurately measured and used to display a broad picture of galaxy assembly across cosmic time. With the powers of current telescopes and super computers, extragalactic astronomy has come to a critical point to study the internal structures of distant galaxies. In this talk, I will present our work of studying a common and important internal feature of distant starforming galaxies, namely giant star-forming clumps, and show how the internal structure significantly improves our understanding of the accretion history of galaxies, evolution of disks, and formation of bulges. I use the data from CANDELS, the largest HST survey program, and state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to answer three questions: (1) When and how were clumps formed? (2) How did they evolve once being formed? (3) What do clumps tell us about the physical mechanisms that regulate star formation? The three aspects reveal clues of how galaxies evolve from small, irregular blobs in early universe into today’s Hubble Sequence. I will also discuss how future multi-wavelength facilities, e.g., JWST, WFIRST, and SKA, would provide new, key information to understand galaxies’ internal structures