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oct08-offprint-abraham.pdf

The Gemini Deep Deep Survey is a survey of galaxies in the redshift range 1 < z < 2 whose main purpose is to determine the abundance of galaxies as a function of mass at the time when the Universe was forming stars most quickly. In a series of papers published over the last four years, the survey has shown that massive and old galaxies are surprisingly common in the distant Universe, lending strong support to a new paradigm for galaxy formation known as 'Cosmic Downsizing'. In many ways the oldest and most massive objects in the survey resemble nearby elliptical galaxies, but they also show some rather interesting differences, such as being much more compact and dense than nearby galaxies of similar mass.