The stellar kinematics and star-formation histories of high-redshift galaxies

Abstract

Galaxies' integrated continuum spectra provide a powerful tool with which to study their formation and evolution. While observations of stellar absorption lines have historically been limited to a handful of objects in the high-redshift Universe, state-of-the-art near-infrared spectrographs have now allowed us to obtain deep rest-frame optical spectra for nearly 60 quiescent galaxies out to z = 2 with signal-to-noise suitable to study their kinematics and stellar populations. I will highlight a number of recent results based on using galaxy kinematics to constrain the evolution of quiescent galaxies and their dark matter haloes, as well as discuss the prospects of obtaining more detailed information about their formation histories from stellar population models.