A galaxy can consist of hundreds of millions or billions of stars. It can contain considerable quantities of interstellar gas and dust and can be subject to environmental influences through interactions with other galaxies and intergalactic gas. It may be forming stars with a variety of rates. And it will contain dark matter and the dynamics of galaxies are largely dominated by this invisible dark component, the nature of which is unknown. This diversity of properties also leads to a degree of uncertainty about the formation mechanism for galaxies. Do they all begin in the same way? Or is there as large a variety of initial conditions as types of galaxies seen today?
The topics covered in this course are:

• Observations of galaxies and how to determine physical properties.

• The initial conditions for galaxy formation in the Early Universe

• The First stars and the first galaxies

• Chemical Evolution and the link to the IGM

• Current models of galaxy formation and evolution.

This course forms a link between courses on the detailed studies of individual galaxies and their properties and cosmology and large scale structure courses. It is a challenging course requiring the application of both theoretical and observational techniques. The lectures will outline the general principles but to successfully complete this course the student must do a lot of private study reading papers in the literature and understanding how to set up and solve problems for themselves.

Learning Objectives:

• historical background.

• properties of different galaxy types through out the Universe, masses, luminosity functions, scaling relations, correlations along the Hubble Sequence, the contribution of SDSS, the Local Group.
  

• Thermal history of the Universe, nucleosynthesis in the Early Universe, the Light Elements.
  

• Evolution of perturbations in the standard big bang model, Jeans instability, adiabatic perturbations, isothermal perturbations, baryonic thoeries of galaxy formation.
  

• Dark Matter and galaxy formation, forms of non-baryonic dark matter, hot and cold dark matter, instabilities in the presense of dark matter.

• collapse of density perturbations, role of dissipation, press-schechter mass function.

• Evolution of galaxies and active galaxies with cosmic epoch, galaxy counts.
  

• The Intergalactic medium, the Gunn-Peterson Test, Lyman-alpha absorption clouds, warm intergalactic gas, modelling the evolution of IGM, the epoch of reionisation.

• Chemical evolution, winds and outlflows
  

• Making real galaxies, star and element formation in galaxies, the global star formation rate, the Hubble deep fields, sub-mm counts, origin of current galay properties
  

Textbook:

Galaxy Formation, 2nd edition, M.S. Longair chps 1, 3, 7,9-11, 12.4-12.8, 13, 16-19

Useful: