Alison Coil is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.

Credit: UCSD

The 'cosmic web' of galaxies, as seen in seven different fields on the sky. Each dot is an entire galaxy. Time or redshift is displayed on the x-axis, such that more distant galaxies present in the early Universe are shown on the right side of the diagram. Galaxies are seen to cluster, in that some regions of space have a higher density of galaxies, while some regions have very few galaxies.

Credit: Published in Skibba et al, 2014, ApJ in press; Alison Coil, UCSD

Distributions of the stellar mass of galaxies at different redshifts. The left panel is for galaxies that are actively forming stars, the right panel is for galaxies that are no longer forming stars or are 'quiescent.' In the nearby Universe, at lower redshift or z, there are more low mass, quiescent galaxies compared to the earlier, distant Universe. Within the star-forming population, there are more massive star-forming galaxies than in the nearby Universe.

Credit: Published in Moustakas et al. 2013, ApJ, 767, 50; Alison Coil, UCSD