Related papers: Large Scale Structure: Setting the Stage for the G…
According to the current understanding of cosmic structure formation, the precursors of the most massive structures in the Universe began to form shortly after the Big Bang, in regions corresponding to the largest fluctuations in the cosmic…
The formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems of astrophysics. Within the broad context of hierachical structure formation, we have only a crude picture of how galaxies like our own came into existence. A…
Research done during the previous century established our Standard Cosmological Model. There are many details still to be filled in, but few would seriously doubt the basic premise. Past surveys have revealed that the large-scale…
A standard theoretical paradigm for the formation of large-scale structure in the distribution of galaxies has now been established, based on the gravitational instability of cold dark matter in a background cosmology dominated by vacuum…
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a typical large spiral galaxy, representative of the most common morphological type in the local Universe. We can determine the properties of individual stars in unusual detail, and use the characteristics of the…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the effective beginning of large, systematic redshift surveys of galaxies. These surveys have had a major impact on observational cosmology and on our current understanding of large-scale structures…
These lectures deal with our current knowledge of the matter distribution in the universe, focusing on how this is studied via the large-scale structure seen in galaxy surveys. We first assemble the necessary basics needed to understand the…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
I describe the beginning, ~ 1970, of the spectroscopic redshift surveys and the discovery of the superclusters filamentary structures and voids. This changed the view of the distribution of luminous light from the way we knew it at the end…
Galaxies form and evolve in the context of their local and large-scale environments. Their baryonic content that we observe with imaging and spectroscopy is intimately connected to the properties of their dark matter halos, and to their…
Understanding the origins and distribution of matter in the Universe is one of the most important quests in physics and astronomy. Themes range from astro-particle physics to chemical evolution in the Galaxy to cosmic nucleosynthesis and…
The analysis of images (of obtained in various ranges of the lengths of waves) of luminous objects in the Universe by means of a method of multilevel dynamic contrasting led author to the conclusions: a) the structures of all observable…
We study the links between star formation history and structure for a large mass-selected galaxy sample at 0.05 < z_phot < 0.30. The galaxies inhabit a very broad range of environments, from cluster cores to the field. Using HST images, we…
I discuss and illustrate the development of large-scale structure in the Universe, emphasising in particular the physical processes and cosmological parameters that most influence the observationally accessible aspects of structure at large…
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…
We propose to use the large-scale structure of the universe as a cosmic standard ruler, based on the fact that the pattern of galaxy distribution should be maintained in the course of time on large scales. By examining the scale-dependence…
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…
In 1970 Zel'dovich published a far-reaching paper presenting a simple equation describing the nonlinear growth of primordial density inhomogeneities. The equation was remarkably successful in explaining the large scale structure in the…
The local Universe displays a rich hierarchical pattern of galaxy clusters and superclusters. The early Universe, however, was almost smooth, with only slight 'ripples' seen in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Models of the…
High resolution gravity plus smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations are used to study the formation of galaxies within the context of hierarchical structure formation. The simulations have sufficient dynamic range to resolve from ten…