Description
The cosmic era between 1<z<2, the so-called “cosmic noon”, marks the peak of cosmic star formation, during which a large fraction of present-day stars has been formed. At these redshifts, typical star-forming galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich discs with high levels of turbulence and star formation activity. However, the mechanisms regulating star formation at these early epochs remain poorly constrained. To understand how distant galaxies evolve into the well-ordered morphologies seen in the local Universe, spatially resolved studies of their interstellar medium properties are essential. Integral Field Unit (IFU) spectroscopy, in particular, allows us to study both the large- and small- scale motions in galaxies. In this poster, I will present preliminary results from new adaptive optics-assisted observations with ERIS, targeting the kinematics of five star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 1.5 at high spatial resolution. When combined with ultra-deep kinematic maps from KMOS, the ERIS data allow us to minimize beam smearing effects and provide maps that trace galaxy kinematics from large radii down to the ~1 kpc scales of star-forming clumps. These multi-scale observations will be key to understand the role of gas dynamics in regulating star formation during the peak epoch of galaxy assembly.
