Related papers: Galaxy Formation and Large Scale Structure
Nearly a century after the true nature of galaxies as distant "island universes" was established, their origin and evolution remain great unsolved problems of modern astrophysics. One of the most promising ways to investigate galaxy…
A new view on our Galaxy has recently emerged, with large consequences on its formation scenarios. Not only new dwarf satellites have been detected, still orbiting and tidally disrupting, but also a multitude of stellar streams or tidal…
Globular clusters (GCs) are among the oldest and most luminous stellar systems in the Universe, offering unique insights into galaxy formation and evolution. While the physical processes behind their origin have long remained elusive, major…
I review progress in understanding the evolution of normal field and cluster galaxies through the combination of HST imaging and ground-based spectroscopy. These data suggest that the bulk of the star formation producing the present-day…
Studies of nearby galaxies including the Milky Way have provided fundamental information on the evolution of structure in the Universe, the existence and nature of dark matter, the origin and evolution of galaxies, and the global features…
Present-day elliptical, spiral and irregular galaxies are large systems made of stars, gas and dark matter. Their properties result from a variety of physical processes that have occurred during the nearly fourteen billion years since the…
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…
The deepest multi-wavelength surveys now provide measurements of star formation in galaxies out to z>1, and allow to reconstruct its history for large parts of the galaxy population. I review recent studies, which have consistently revealed…
We present a review of recent studies of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, in particular based on large samples of non-kinematically selected stars with available proper motions. The Milky Way is argued to be a reasonable…
It is an obvious statement that all the galaxies we see today in and around our Local Group have been forming and evolving for a significant fraction of the age of the Universe. It is not a great leap of logic to further state that the…
Star formation history shows a gradual decline since the last 8-9 Gyr (z=1). The bulk of present-day stellar mass and metal content was formed at redshifts lower than 2-3, which is consistent with a hierarchical scenario of galaxy…
Timescales in astronomy comprise the largest range of any scientific discipline. In the construction of physical models, this circumstance may both be a blessing and a curse. For example, galaxy evolution occurs on typical timescales of…
In a large scale view of the universe, galaxies are the basic unit of structure. A typical bright galaxy may contain 100 billion stars and span tens of thousands of light years, but the empty expanses between the galaxies are much larger…
Our knowledge of the Universe remains discovery-led: in the absence of adequate physics-based theory, interpretation of new results requires a scientific methodology. Commonly, scientific progress in astrophysics is motivated by the…
The chemical abundances in the atmosphere of a star provide unique information about the gas from which that star formed, and, modulo processes that are not important for the vast majority of stars, such as mass transfer in close binary…
In this review, the formation, evolution, and decay of the large-scale structure of the Universe is discussed in the context of observational data, numerical simulations, and the Cosmological Standard Model (CSM). Problems concerning…
Stellar Populations are the fossil record of Galactic evolution. Interpretation of this record in the Local Group allows one to determine reliably the dominant physics controlling the evolution of those galaxies which are typical of the…
Current data broadly support trends of galaxy surface brightness profile amplitude and shape with total stellar mass predicted by state-of-the-art Lambda-CDM cosmological simulations, although recent results show signs of interesting…
Once understood as the paradigm of passively evolving objects, the discovery that massive galaxies experienced an enormous structural evolution in the last ten billion years has opened an active line of research. The most significant…
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…