Sujet These Doctorale 2010 LE FEVRE Angl

PhD thesis at Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I (2010-2011) PhD topic : The first galaxies and mass assembly in galaxies 1 to 4 billion years after the Big-Bang Keywords : Formation and evolution of galaxies and large scale structures. PhD thesis advisor : Olivier Le Fèvre, Director LAM, Olivier.LeFevre@oamp.fr Location : LAM, Technopole de Château Gombert, Marseille, France, http://www.oamp.fr/lam Summary of the PhD thesis : The currently favored scenario for the formation and evolution of galaxies is based on a hierarchical assembly of mass, with smaller structures merging along time to build more massive structures. There are still many unknowns in this scenario, because observations at early epochs are difficult and therefore incomplete. In particular, the epoch when the first galaxies were assembled is still out of reach of current observational capabilities, and the critical epoch when most of the mass seem to have been assembled, between redshifts 1 and 5, is still poorly observed. Making observations in the infrared should enable to find the first galaxies at the reionization epoch, to follow the star formation history, and to understand how stellar mass has assembled along cosmic time. Until today it has been very difficult to obtain very deep near-infrared images and the spectroscopic ...