Related papers: The Science of Galaxy Formation
In this series of lectures I review recent observational progress in constraining models of galaxy formation and evolution highlighting the importance advances in addressing questions of the assembly history and origin of the Hubble…
I review the current state of our understanding of the galaxy formation and evolution process from the modeler's perspective. With the advent of the cold dark matter model and the support of fast computers and advanced simulation…
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up…
Star formation is a complex multi-scale phenomenon that is of significant importance for astrophysics in general. Stars and star formation are key pillars in observational astronomy from local star forming regions in the Milky Way up to…
The Standard Model of Particle Physics has been verified to unprecedented precision in the last few decades. However there are still phenomena in nature which cannot be explained, and as such new theories will be required. Since terrestrial…
According to the hierarchical model, small galaxies form first and merge together to form bigger objects. In parallel, galaxies assemble their mass through accretion from cosmic filaments. Recently, the increased spatial resolution of the…
Astronomy is a precise and relatively simple science because objects accelerate in a gravitational field at the same rate, irrespective of their composition. Galileo knew this, and Einstein took it as the basis for general relativity.…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
Advances in theoretical ideas on how galaxies formed have not been strongly influenced by the advances in observations of what might be in the voids between the concentrations of ordinary optically selected galaxies. The theory and…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so --- thanks to the progress in observations --- but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our…
The latest astrophysical data on the Supernova luminosity--distance -- redshift relations, primordial nucleosynthesis, value of Cosmic Microwave Background--temperature, and baryon asymmetry are considered as an evidence of relative…
An overview over the current status of modeling galaxies by means of numerical simulations is given. After a short description of how galaxies form in hierarchically clustering scenarios, success and failures of current simulations are…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
This is the dawning of the age of precision cosmology, when all the important parameters will be established to one significant figure or better, within the cosmological model. In the age of accurate cosmology the model, which nowadays…
Modern physics is founded on two mainstays: mathematical modelling and empirical verification. These two assumptions are prerequisite for the objectivity of scientific discourse. Here we show, however, that they are contradictory, leading…
ecent observations of type Ia supernovae indicate that the Universe is in an accelerating phase of expansion. The fundamental quest in theoretical cosmology is to identify the origin of this phenomenon. In principle there are two…
New constraints on stellar models are provided by large surveys of massive stars, interferometric observations and asteroseismology. After a review of the main results so far obtained, we present new results from rotating models and discuss…