The first massive elliptical galaxies were already in place when the Universe was only 3 billions years old. Surprisingly, they are more compact in comparison to their present-day counterparts. In... Show moreThe first massive elliptical galaxies were already in place when the Universe was only 3 billions years old. Surprisingly, they are more compact in comparison to their present-day counterparts. In this thesis these recent findings are assessed by measuring the stellar kinematics of massive z=2 galaxies from spectra obtained with X-Shooter on the Very Large Telescope. This thesis work shows that high-redshift galaxies are truly very massive and structurally very different from present-day galaxies, yet they follow the same scaling relations. Show less
