I review the current status of understanding when, how long, and how giant elliptical galaxies formed, focusing on the globular clusters. Several observational evidences show that massive elliptical galaxies formed at z > 2 (> 10 Gyr ago). Giant elliptical galaxies show mostly a bimodal color distribution of globular clusters, indicating a factor of ≈ 20 metallicity difference between the two peaks. The red globular clusters (RGCs) are closely related with the stellar halo in color and spatial distribution, while the blue globular clusters (BGCs) are not. The ratio of the number of the RGCs and that of the BGCs varies depending on galaxies. It is concluded that the BGCs might have formed 12-13 Gyr ago, while the RGCs and giant elliptical galaxies might have formed similarly 10-11 Gyr ago. It remains now to explain the existence of a gap between the RGC formation epoch and the BGC formation epoch, and the rapid metallicity increase during the gap (Δt ≈ 2 Gyr). If hierarchical merging can form a significant number of giant elliptical galaxies > 10 Gyr ago, several observational constraints from stars and globular clusters in elliptical galaxies can be explained.

Almost half of primeval galaxies show P-Cygni type profiles in the Lyα emission line. The main underlying mechanism for the profile formation in these systems is thought to be the frequency re-distribution of the line photons in expanding scattering media surrounding the emission source. A Monte Carlo code is developed to investigate the Lyα line transfer in an optically thick and moving medium with a careful consideration of the scattering in the damping wings. Typical column densities and expansion velocities of neutral hydrogen investigated in this study are NH1 ~10 17-20 cm -2 and ΔV ~ 100 km s-1. We investigate the dependence of the emergent profiles on the kinematics and on the column density. Our numerical results are applied to show that the damped Lyα absorbers may possess an expanding H I supershell with bulk flow of ~ 200 km s-l and H I column density NH1 ~ 10 19 cm -2. We briefly discuss the observational implications.

We show that the star formation activity of spiral galaxies has a great variety. The star formation variation in a time scale of 10 8 yr and the mechanism responsible for the variation are discussed.

We construct a simple photometric evolution model of galaxies based on the evolutionary population synthesis. In our models an exponentially decreasing SFR with a power law IMF is used to compute the UBV colors of galaxies from ellipticals to late type spirals. It is shown that the integrated colors of galaxies with different Hubble type can be explained by one parameter, SFR.