Star Formation and Structure Formation at Redshifts 1 < z < 4

Abstract

The advent of 8m-class telescopes has made galaxies at 1 < z < 4 relatively easy to detect and study. This is a brief and incomplete review of some of the recent results to emerge from surveys at these redshifts. After describing different strategies for finding galaxies at z >~ 1, and the differences (and similarities) in the resulting galaxy samples, I summarize what is known about the spatial clustering of star-forming galaxies at z >~ 1. Optically selected galaxies are the main focus of this review, but in the final section I discuss the connection between optical and sub-mm samples, and argue that the majority of the 850 micron background may have been produced by known optically selected populations at high redshift. Among the new results presented are the dust-corrected luminosity function of Lyman-break galaxies at z~3, the estimated contribution to the 850 micron background from optically selected galaxies at 1<z<5, revised estimates of the spatial clustering strength of Lyman-break galaxies at z~3, and an estimate of the clustering strength of star-forming galaxies at z~1 derived from a new spectroscopic sample of ~800 galaxies with <z> = 1.0, sigma_z = 0.10.