Filippo Fraternali

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 14 billion years since the Big Bang.

This comprehensive textbook, which bridges the gap between introductory and specialised texts, explains the key physical processes of galaxy formation, from the cosmological recombination of primordial gas to the evolution of the different galaxies that we observe in the Universe today.

In a logical sequence, it introduces cosmology, illustrates the properties of galaxies in the present-day Universe, then explains the physical processes behind galaxy formation in the cosmological context, taking into account the most recent developments in this field. This text ends on how to find distant galaxies with multi-wavelength observations, and how to extract the physical and evolutionary properties of galaxies based on imaging and spectroscopic data.