Related papers: Constraints on Galaxy Structure and Evolution from…
Stellar halos around galaxies retain fundamental evidence of the processes which lead to their build up. Sophisticated models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context yield quantitative predictions about various observable…
We explore the motivation behind large stellar surveys in Galactic astronomy, in particular, surveys that measure the photometric, phase space and abundance properties of thousands or millions of stars. These observations are essential to…
The formation of galactic discs and the efficiency of star formation within them are issues central to our understanding of galaxy formation. We have developed a detailed and versatile model of disc formation which combines the strengths of…
Models of structure formation in the universe postulate that matter distributions observed today in galaxy catalogs arise, through a complex non-linear dynamics, by gravitational evolution from a very uniform initial state. Dark matter…
Changes in the law of gravity have far-reaching implications for the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters, and appear as peculiar signatures in their mass-observable relations, structural properties, internal dynamics, and abundance.…
These lectures summarize our basic understanding of the emergence of cosmic structures, the epoch of first light, the survival of early substructure in present-day galaxy halos.
Many clues about the galaxy assembly process lurk in the faint outer regions of galaxies. Although quantitative study of these parts has been severely limited in the past, breakthroughs are now being made thanks to the combination of…
I review at the non-specialist level recent progress in the study of the large-scale structure of the Universe, covering the following areas: (1) Results from recently completed or ongoing redshift surveys of galaxies and X-ray clusters;…
What galaxy lives in what halo? The answer to this simple question holds important information regarding galaxy formation and evolution. We describe a new statistical technique to link galaxies to their dark matter haloes, or light to mass,…
Dark energy is the candidate that can produce effective negative pressure and make the galaxies and galaxy clusters move away from each other in an accelerated way. The structures of the Universe have evolved from some initial primordial…
These notes collect together current work on the effect of the environment on galaxy formation and evolution. They are broken into four distinct parts. The first deals with the observational debate surrounding the question of whether…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
Properties of nearby dwarf galaxies are briefly discussed. Dwarf galaxies vary widely in their star formation histories, the ages of their subpopulations, and in their enrichment history. Furthermore, many dwarf galaxies show evidence for…
The Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
Current ideas on the formation of the Galaxy are reviewed. Many of the observed characteristics of our Milky Way System are consistent with a scenario in which the Galaxy formed inside out, with the inner part of it evolving by rapid…
Current theories of galaxy formation have tended to focus on hierarchical structure formation, which is the most likely scenario for cosmological models with lots of power at small scales (e.g. standard cold dark matter). Models with little…
In this review, we describe our current understanding of cluster formation: from the general picture of collapse from initial density fluctuations in an expanding Universe to detailed simulations of cluster formation including the effects…
In the past years a wealth of observations has unraveled the structural properties of dark and luminous mass distribution in galaxies, a benchmark for understanding dark matter and the process of galaxy formation. The study of the…
We investigate the dependence of galaxy structure on a variety of galactic and environmental parameters for ~500,000 galaxies at z<0.2, taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7 (SDSS-DR7). We utilise bulge-to-total stellar…
Cosmic structures at large scales represent the earliest and most extended form of matter condensation. In this lecture we review the application of the methods and concepts of modern statistical physics to these structures. This leads to a…