The Beginning of the End - Charting the Emergence and Evolution of Massive Galaxies

Galaxies are extraordinarily complex collections of stars, gas, and dark matter. The largest galaxies, although relatively rare in number, host many of the stars in the Universe and deep in their cores harbor the most extreme supermassive black holes. Today massive galaxies are old - their stars are red and dead and their dynamical structures are dispersion supported. While massive galaxies have long been expected to be relics of a much earlier formation time, JWST is just now revealing their earliest histories, including their formation hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang. In this talk I will describe my team’s observational efforts to identify and characterize massive galaxies in the distant Universe with JWST and throughout cosmic time, including with the new Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph.