Astronomy and Astrophysics Library- Galaxy Formation

Many of the agonies which had to be gone through in the rst edition have disappeared and, to many people’s amazement, including mine, there is now a concordance model for cosmology, the cosmologist’s equivalent of the particle physicist’s standard model.

This second edition of Galaxy Formation is an up-to-date text on astrophysical cosmology, expounding the structure of the classical cosmological models from a contemporary viewpoint. This forms the background to a detailed study of the origin of structure and galaxies in the Universe. The derivations of many of the most important results are derived by simple physical arguments which illuminate the results of more advanced treatments. A very wide range of observational data is brought to bear upon these problems, including the most recent results from WMAP, the Hubble Space Telescope, galaxy surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, studies of Type 1a supernovae, and many other observations.