Abstract

In the last years, our knowledge of galaxy formation in the early Universe has grown considerablyDeep multi-wavelength HST observations of the main extragalactic fields (such as CANDELS and the Frontier Fields) have allowed us to identify galaxies up to redshift 10, derive the evolution of the UV luminosity function and SFR density up to these early epochs. Progress is not limited anymore by statistics, but by the systematic uncertainties in some of the crucial physical properties of galaxies such as dust, metallicity, ionizing emissivity and so on. Systematic spectroscopic follow up is needed as a key complement both to validate the above results but most importantly to probe the ISM conditions, gas kinematics, chemical enrichment and to understand the environmental impact on galaxy evolution. In this talk I will present VANDELS :a VIMOS survey of the CANDELS UDS and CDFS fields, the latest ESO VLT public spectroscopic survey which has obtained ultra deep optical spectra with up to 80 hours of integration of > 2100 galaxies at 1.5 < z < 6 . I will present some of the most important early results, which highlight the impact of working with high S/N spectra of distant galaxies to assess their physical properties.