The Vimos Vlt Deep Survey: Redshift Distribution of a I _AB ≤ 24 Sample, and the Effect of Environment on Galaxy Evolution

Abstract

The knowledge of the general framework of galaxy evolution from direct observation is necessary to understand the morphologies and substructures like bars which are frequently observed in nearby galaxies. We report here on the progress of the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS). This survey is aimed to study the evolution of the main population of galaxies from z ~ 5 to present from the observation of an unprecedented large sample of galaxies with measured redshifts using VIMOS on the ESO-VLT. The first epoch sample of ~ 10000 objects observed with I _AB ≤ 24 yields 8626 galaxy redshifts, and 64 QSOs. We are showing here first results on the evolution of the Luminosity Function (LF) of galaxies in under dense vs. over dense environments: the LF is steeper in low redshift environements at all redshifts up to z ~ 1, and the luminosity evolution seems to have the same amplitude for either type of environment over this redshift range. We quantify for the first time the evolution of the bias between the distribution of galaxies and dark matter haloes, with a ~ 40% evolution of the bias between z = 0.7 and z = 1.4 probably indicating that merging is playing a major role in driving the evolution of galaxies.