Galaxies are not static objects scattered across the sky—they grow, merge, and change over billions of years, and astronomers are piecing together how that happens by reading the fossil records left in stars and gas. This research tackles a central question in modern astronomy: how did galaxies like the Milky Way form and evolve over cosmic time? The problem is a stated priority in the UK’s STFC Road Map and in national astronomy surveys worldwide. The team will attack the question on three fronts. They will study the resolved stellar populations of the Milky Way and its nearby companion galaxies to reconstruct how those systems assembled dynamically, formed stars, and built up heavy elements. They will observe distant galaxies as they appeared up to 12 billion years ago, directly measuring how star formation and metal enrichment changed over cosmic time. And they will examine the large-scale star formation and chemical properties of nearby galaxies to connect the local fossil record to the distant, high-redshift universe. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven science. It has no immediate practical application. But understanding how galaxies form is the bedrock of cosmology—similar foundational work on stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis later enabled everything from precision navigation to the discovery of dark energy. A deeper grasp of galaxy assembly could, in the long run, sharpen our models of how the universe works.
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TThis programmatic five-year rolling grant application addresses one of the most important problems in extragalactic astronomy, the formation and evolution of galaxies. The task is one of the key goals in the current STFC Road Map and is a defining objective of virtually every national decadal survey world-wide. A full understanding of galaxy formation and evolution requires multiple lines of attack. Observations of the resolved stellar populations in the Milky Way and its Local Group companions provide a detailed fossil record of the dynamical assemblies of the galaxies, the formation of stars, and the buildup of heavy elements over a wide range of mass scales and initial conditions. At the other end of the scale, observations of distant galaxies spanning lookback times of up to 12 Gyr provide direct measurements of the evolution of galaxy populations and the buildup of stars and metals with cosmic time. Finally, measurements of the large-scale star formation and abundance properties of nearby galaxies form a vital astrophysical bridge between the studies of nearby resolved stellar populations and the distant high-redshift investigations, by allowing us to characterise the evolutionary properties of the Hubble sequence and the complex ``gastrophysical'' processes that regulate the accretion of gas and the formation of stars in galaxies. In this rolling grant application we propose a series of investigations that will advance our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution on all three fronts.
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