Program: GS-2012B-Q-88

The last few years have seen dramatic shifts in our understanding on how the majority of stars in our Universe have formed. IFU dynamical data from large telescopes suggest that most of the star-formation in massive galaxies at high-redshifts occurs in clumpy disks (albeit highly turbulent ones), fed by cold flows. This contrasts starkly with the modern Universe where the highest star-formation rate objects found so far are fueled by gas rich mergers. The high-velocity H-alpha dispersion of the high-redshift young galaxies is a key and unexpected feature. Nearby disks generally have modest velocity dispersions. However we have discovered a sample of very rare objects, as part of an IFS campaign to observe the most H-alpha luminous galaxies in SDSS, that include objects seemingly identical to these high-redshift turbulent disks. Being nearby they can be observed in great detail. An important question is what is the physical driver of the high-velocity dispersions? By measuring the STELLAR kinematics of the galaxies with the GMOS IFU we can test for feedback vs instability scenarios, an observation impossible for their high-z cousins. We require a followup observation of a few A0 stars in order to verify the accuracy of our stellar velocities and velocity dispersions which were obtained by fitting stellar templates to our IFU spectra.