The Cosmic Evolution of Galaxy Structure

Galaxies are the fundamental units of cosmic matter that make up the universe and they change in remarkable ways over 13.7 billion years of cosmic time. We are just now discovering how galaxies we can see over these billions of years are evolving from small, star forming systems to larger, more massive and passive systems at later times. This book explains the structural evolution of galaxies, how we measure it, how these measurements change with time, and how observing this reveals important information about galaxy formation and evolution. It also explains the future of the field through the use of machine learning tools, and how galaxy structure can be used as a new approach to measure unique features of the universe, such as cosmological properties and parameters.

Key Features

• The first book dedicated to the topic
• Written by a world-leading expert in the field
• Includes results from recent galaxy surveys including the Hubble Ultra Deep Fields, GOODS, COSMOS, and CANDELS
• Explores the future of the field with machine learning tools

Christopher J Conselice is currently a Professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester. He is an expert on the properties and evolution of galaxies, and in 2009 he won the Leverhulme Prize for his research. Before coming to Manchester, he was a Professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech, and he completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD.