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For the past 15 years most astronomers have assumed that 95% of the Universe was in some mysterious form of cold dark matter. They also assumed that the cosmological constant, Omega_Lambda, was Einstein's biggest blunder and could be…
A mathematical model of the natural origin of our universe is presented. The model is based only on well-established physics. No claim is made that this model uniquely represents exactly how the universe came about. But the viability of a…
Theories of how galaxies, the fundamental constituents of large-scale structure, form and evolve have undergone a dramatic paradigm shift in the last few decades. Earlier views were of rapid, early collapse and formation of basic…
In the first two years of operation JWST has delivered key new insights into the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early Universe. By combining imaging with spectroscopy, we discovered and characterised the first generation of…
Over the past two decades, an avalanche of data from multiwavelength imaging and spectroscopic surveys has revolutionized our view of galaxy formation and evolution. Here we review the range of complementary techniques and theoretical tools…
The structure, formation and evolution of the Universe were some of the main topics in the scientific debates during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. They involved novel ideas on the cosmos, which concerned aspects that were not…
The first dwarf galaxies, which constitute the building blocks of the collapsed objects we find today in the Universe, had formed hundreds of millions of years after the big bang. This pedagogical review describes the early growth of their…
For a few years now, cosmology has a standard model. By this term, we mean a consistent theoretical background which is at the same time simple and broad enough to offer coherent explanations for the vast majority of cosmological phenomena.…
The great advances in the network of cosmological tests show that the relativistic Big Bang theory is a good description of our expanding universe. But the properties of nearby galaxies that can be observed in greatest detail suggest a…
One of the greatest achievements of twentieth century physics is the discovery of a very close link between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This follows from the two basic principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, the uncertainty…
It is generally believed that in the epoch prior to the formation of the first stars, the Universe was completely dark (the period is therefore known as the Dark Ages). Usually, the start of this epoch is placed at the photon decoupling. In…
The evolution of life has been a big enigma despite rapid advancements in the fields of biochemistry, astrobiology, and astrophysics in recent years. The answer to this puzzle has been as mind-boggling as the riddle relating to evolution of…
In the inflationary scenario all the matter constituting the universe was created from the process of reheating after inflation. Recent development of the theory of reheating is briefly reviewed. The list of topics includes elementary…
We study the origin of the universe (or pre-inflation) by suggesting that the primordial space-time in the universe suffered a global topological phase transition, from a 4D Euclidean manifold to an asymptotic 4D hyperbolic one. We…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
The exactly solvable quantum model of the homogeneous, isotropic and closed universe in the matter-energy production epoch is considered. It is assumed that the universe is originally filled with a uniform scalar field and a perfect fluid…
A Big Bang universe consisting, before recombination, of H, D, 3He, 4He, 6Li, and 7Li ions, electrons, photons, and massless neutrinos, at closure density, with a galaxy-size perturbation spectrum but no large-scale structure, will evolve…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or…
Till the late nineties the accepted cosmological model was that of a Universe that had originated in the Big Bang and was now decelerating under the influence of as yet undetected dark matter, so that it would come to a halt and eventually…