The morphological identification of the rapidly evolving population of faint galaxies

Abstract

The excess numbers of blue galaxies at faint magnitudes are a long-standing cosmological puzzle. We present new number-magnitude counts as a function of galactic morphology from the first deep fields of the Cycle 4 Hubble Space Telescope {\it Medium Deep Survey} project. From a sample of 301 galaxies we define counts for elliptical, spiral and irregular/peculiar galaxies to $I=22$. We find two principal results. Firstly the elliptical and spiral galaxy counts both follow the predictions of high-normalisation no-evolution models at all magnitudes, indicating that regular Hubble types evolve only slowly to $z\sim 0.5$. Secondly we find that irregular/peculiar galaxies, including multiple-peaked, possibly merging, objects, have a very steep number-magnitude relation and greatly exceed predictions based on proportions in local surveys. These systems make up half the total counts by $I=22$ and imply the rapidly-evolving component of the faint galaxy population has been identified.