MG14 - Talk detail

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Abstract

Over the past few years, instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope have provided tantalising glimpses of a time when the earliest galaxies were just assembling in an infant Universe. The large volumes surveyed and significant number statistics collected provide an unprecedented opportunity to use these tiny systems as cosmological probes, specially to understand the nature of Dark Matter at an epoch unaccessible by other means. I will present a semi-analytic theoretical model that captures the key physics of supernova feedback in ejecting gas from low-mass halos, and tracks the resulting impact on the subsequent growth of more massive systems via halo mergers and gas re-accretion in early galaxies at z~5-15. In addition to successfully explaining a wide rage of observed data sets, our model naturally predicts the evolution of the luminosity function and yields a census of the cosmic stellar mass density at these early epochs. I will show how the forthcoming James Webb Space telescope will be an invaluable "Dark Matter Machine", allowing us to distinguish between Cold and Warm Dark matter cosmologies. I will end by showing the implications of early galaxy formation for reionization in both cold and warm Dark Matter cosmologies.

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