Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Collection of oral and poster presentations from the Roman2020 virtual conference on "Galaxy Formation and Evolution in the Era of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope", hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute 5-9 October 2020. Transcripts from live captioning are also available. Videos of most conference sessions are available at STScI Live Science Events on Facebook.

Our knowledge of galaxy formation and evolution has greatly expanded in recent decades thanks to large survey programs, including those carried out with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). These programs led to numerous discoveries, deepening our understanding of the properties of high-redshift galaxies, the evolution of galaxy morphology over cosmic time, the physics of quenching and feedback mechanisms, populations of faint or optically obscured AGN, and enabled a new era of multi-wavelength photometric redshifts. But, to significantly further advance in the future, we need to expand our observations to exploit wide-field capabilities, beyond HST's relatively narrow sky coverage, in the next decade of surveys with upcoming facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the Euclid Mission and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly named the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). Specifically, the Roman Space Telescope, planned for launch in the mid-2020s, will provide HST quality imaging over 0.28 sq. degrees (a field of view about a 100x larger than HST/ACS) at wavelengths between 0.5 microns and 2 microns. In addition to performing dedicated surveys, the Roman Space Telescope will support a Guest Observer program and archival investigations of all Roman data, which will be open to the community with no proprietary period. Roman’s large field of view will enable vastly larger galaxy surveys than possible with HST. This conference aims to engage the extragalactic community in exploring how we can synergistically advance the astrophysics of galaxy formation and evolution in the era of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.