Final Report Summary - UPGAL (Understanding the Physics of Galaxy Formation and Evolution at High Redshift)
Among our major results we have shown that the much higher activity of star formation in the distant Universe is accounted by the larger content of gas in the galaxies, rather than a result of increased interactions between galaxies. We have shown that different star formation laws apply to normal disk like galaxies as opposed to starburst galaxies undergoing merging events, unless the different dynamical times of the systems are taken into account. We have developed a unified simple framework describing the distribution of star formation and gas content in galaxies through cosmic time. We have shown the continuity of black hole growth and star formation. We have discovered the most distant galaxy cluster currently known and investigated its content.
Our group has published 38 papers directly related to this project, including one of our team members as first author or among the first co-authors. We have been presenting our results to a large number of international conferences: 24 for the PI only, mostly invited talks, and a similar numbers of presentations were given by postdocs and students working for this project.