What’s special about our corner of the Universe? How did our galaxy come to be and how might it change in future? In this course we will explore the variety of galaxies, from near to far, ‘ordinary’ to exotic, and we will investigate how modern space missions and observatories are changing our understanding of their behaviour.
Galaxies are messy and complicated places, made up of a range of ingredients - not just the stars we can observe with an optical telescope. This course will begin by examining what a galaxy is, and how galaxies relate to other types of astronomical objects. We will examine how astronomers over the course of the 20th century used their growing understanding of the physics of stars to unravel the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We will consider what we’ve learnt from some of the beautiful images of the Hubble Space Telescope, and discuss how new projects such as the European Gaia mission will help to disentangle the history of how the Milky Way formed and how it will evolve in future.
We will move on to discuss the zoo of other galaxies, their variety of properties, and how we can study the most distant galaxies in the Universe. We will also explore how looking beyond visible light changes our perspective on different types of galaxies, and examine the most exotic types of galaxies: active galaxies and quasars, where supermassive black holes feed on nearby gas and produce cosmic fireworks. Finally we will place galaxies in the wider context, considering how individual galaxies connect together in larger groups to form a cosmic web of structure stretching out to the furthest stretches of the Universe, and we will explore how modern computer simulations are helping us to understand the evolution of the cosmic web and our Galaxy’s place within it.
