Active Physics & Astronomy Climate, Earth & Environment

RISEandFALL - The rise and fall of galaxies in the early Universe

Funder UKRI
Recipient organisation University of Cambridge
Funding £2.1M
Period Mar 2023 — Mar 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The James Webb Space Telescope will stare deeper into the cosmos than ever before to catch the very first galaxies as they flicker to life. This research tackles a fundamental gap in astronomy: we do not know how the earliest galaxies built up their stars and heavy elements, nor why many of them later stopped forming stars entirely. Current telescopes cannot see far enough back in time to answer these questions. The project will use three world-class facilities—the James Webb Space Telescope, the MOONS spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope, and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array—to observe galaxies when the Universe was less than a billion years old. One part of the work will trace how these infant galaxies grew and enriched their gas with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The other part will identify what shuts down star formation, turning active galaxies into passive, red systems. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. It will not build a better phone or cure a disease. But understanding how galaxies—including our own Milky Way—formed and evolved addresses one of the deepest questions about our cosmic origins. Similar fundamental research into galaxy formation has already reshaped how we think about dark matter, black holes, and the structure of the Universe itself.

View original technical description
Understanding the nature of the very first galaxies and the physical processes responsible for the build up of their stellar mass and chemical enrichment, as well as their subsequent decline in terms of star formation, are some of the ultimate goals of extragalactic astrophysics. This project will primarily exploit access to two forthcoming, cutting-edge observing facilities, the James Webb Space Telescope and the MOONS spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope, as well as data from the Atacama Large (sub-)Millimetre Array, to achieve an unprecedented leap forward on these topics. The project is divided in two main parts: the first one investigating galaxies in their infancy and their rapid growth and chemical enrichment during the early cosmic epochs; the second part will investigate the competing processes that quench star formation resulting in the emergence of passive systems. Understanding the 'Rise and Fall' of galaxies across the cosmic epochs is a vast area of research. The proposal will focus on the following, ambitious goals: 1) identify and reveal the nature of the first population of galaxies and of their black hole seeds; 2) determine the early evolution of the stellar mass growth and associated chemical enrichment to constrain the primary galaxy evolutionary mechanisms in the early Universe; 3) determine the primary processes responsible for quenching star formation in galaxies across the cosmic epochs.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Roberto Maiolino (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Cosmic Reionization: Galaxy-IGM Physics in the Early Universe
The Formation of the First Galaxies and Reionization with the James Webb Space Telescope
Exploring the epoch of first light and the cosmic history of galaxies
Revealing the drivers of galaxy formation in the densest cosmic environments
Galaxy growth and evolution over the last ~8 billion years

Original classification

Research Grant

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