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WHEN GALAXIES WERE BORN WHEN GALAXIES W ERE BORN the quest for cosmic dawn RICHARD S. ELLIS prince ton university press prince ton and oxford Copyright © 2022 by Prince ton University Press Prince ton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the pro gress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press . princeton . edu Published by Prince ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince ton, New Jersey 08540 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX press . princeton . edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ellis, Richard S. (Richard Salisbury), 1950– author. Title: When galaxies were born : the quest for cosmic dawn / Richard S. Ellis. Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022002210 (print) | LCCN 2022002211 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691211305 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691241678 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Galaxies—Formation. | Cosmology. | Astronomy—Observations. | BISAC: SCIENCE / Space Science / General | SCIENCE / Space Science / Astronomy Classification: LCC QB857 .E45 2022 (print) | LCC QB857 (ebook) | DDC 523.1/12—dc23/eng20220524 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002210 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002211 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Ingrid Gnerlich and Whitney Rauenhorst Production Editorial: Kathleen Cioffi Text and Jacket Design: Karl Spurzem Production: Jacqueline Poirier Publicity: Sara Henning- Stout and Kate Farquhar- Thomson Copyeditor: Maia Vaswani Jacket images: (Top) Hubble views a cosmic Interaction, NASA. (Bottom) Mauna Kea Observatories by Julian Abrams This book has been composed in Arno Pro with Trade Gothic Next Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Preface xiii Abbreviations xvii 1 Out into Space 1 2 Grand Time Machines 13 3 Palomar: The Perfect Machine 29 4 The Anglo- Australian Revolution 49 5 La Palma: La Isla Bonita 79 6 A Golden Era: Synergies with Hubble Space Telescope 109 7 The Mighty Keck Telescopes: Lifting the Curtain 135 8 Entering the Reionisation Era 153 9 The Arrival of the Euro: A Glimpse of Cosmic Dawn 173 Epilogue: A Promising Future 199 Illustration Credits 211 Index 217 v ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 0.1. The most distant known galaxy versus publication date in terms of its redshift and the age of the universe when the galaxy is being observed xiv 3.1. The end of the road for the Hubble diagram of brightest cluster galaxies 42 4.1. A small portion of the photographic plate taken by Bruce Peterson at the AAT and a contour map resulting from the pro cessing of this area by the Cambridge APM group 59 4.2. Measuring- machine studies of photographic plates in the 1970s 59 4.3. The redshift distribution n(z) of the AAT surveys indicated a no- evolution distribution despite a substantial excess in the number counts 69 5.1. The telescopes at the Observatorio de Roque de Los Muchachos on the summit of the island of La Palma 80 5.2. State of the art after the LDSS-2 redshift survey undertaken at the WHT in 1994 88 5.3. Results from the Canada-France Redshift Survey 90 5.4. The wide range in brightness probed over the redshift range 0 < z < 1 via the extended Autofib redshift survey enabled computation of the luminosity distribution of galaxies at vari ous epochs 93 vii viii List of Illustrations 6.1. The tattered remnant of the Lockheed advertisement in the 1977 Financial Times, with my rec ord of the seemingly ever- receding launch date 110 6.2. Two influential astrophysicists who ensured the scientific success of the Hubble Space Telescope 112 6.3. HST WFC negative image of a redshift z = 0.32 cluster taken prior to the 1993 servicing mission, HST image of three galaxies compared with a ground- based equivalent, and deconvolution of the HST image 121 6.4. Morphological classifications from Medium Deep Survey images taken after the HST servicing mission 124–125 6.5. Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute from 1993 to 1998 127 6.6. Galaxy counts by morphological class versus apparent magnitude in the Hubble Deep Field 130 8.1. Dan Stark and Matt Schenker at the Keck Observatory during the challenging NIRSPEC era 164 8.2. Charting the end of reionisation using Lyman alpha emission in galaxies 165 10.1. Delays to the predicted launch date of JWST from the late 1990s to 2017, with a pessimistic view of the eventual outcome 204 Colour Plates (following page 28) 1. How I discovered astronomy from Patrick Moore’s book 2. University College London Observatory at Mill Hill, the 24- inch Radcliffe refractor, and my photo graph of the February 1971 partial solar eclipse 3. Herstmonceux Castle, the home of the former Royal Greenwich Observatory and the location of the Isaac Newton List of Illustrations ix Telescope in the late 1960s, and the relocated telescope on the island of La Palma 4. Eve ning twilight on the Canarian island of La Palma with a view of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory 5. The evolving nature of telescope control rooms 6. Emergency instructions in the control room at the Hale Telescope on Mount Palomar and the library for visiting astronomers at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile 7. Monolithic and segmented primary mirrors 8. The detector revolution from photography to mosaicked CCDs 9. A deep exposure of a small patch of sky taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing many hundreds of galaxies over a wide range in distance and hence “lookback time” 10. Physical origin of the cosmological redshift and schematic of how redshift relates to the lookback time to a distant galaxy 11. An unnamed large telescope in a children’s encyclopaedia and the Hale 5- metre reflector 12. With Allan Sandage at Durham University in 1992 and the Hale 5- metre telescope 13. With Jim Gunn in Tokyo in 2010 and the Hubble Space Telescope image of cluster 0024 + 1654 at a redshift z = 0.40 14. Twilight on Mount Palomar with the Hale Telescope ready for action 15. The 3.9- metre Anglo- Australian Telescope 16. The 1.2- metre UK Schmidt Telescope 17. The fledgling “Durham group” in 1978 and the Automated Plate Mea sur ing machine at Cambridge 18. Observing at the AAT in the 1980s