Session J6 - How Galaxies Form and Evolve.
INVITED session, Sunday afternoon, April 29
Auditorium, Renaissance Hotel
Cosmologists will soon be able to directly measure the evolution of density fluctuations from the weakly linear into the non-linear regime. Measurements of microwave background fluctuations on angular scales larger than 10' trace density variations at a redshift of 1000. Measurements on arcminute scales trace the non-linear growth of structure at redshift near 10 through the Ostriker-Vishniac effect. Gravitational lensing observations probe the distribution of matter in the linear and non-linear regime at low redshift. By combining these observations, we will be able to learn about the nature of the dark energy, the properties of the dark matter, and test general relativity.