From the Realm of the Nebulae to Populations of Galaxies

From the Realm of the Nebulae to Populations of Galaxies PDF Author: Mauro D'Onofrio
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319310062
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
In order to outline possible future directions in galaxy research, this book wants to be a short stopover, a moment of self-reflection of the past century of achievements in this area. Since the pioneering years of galaxy research in the early 20th century, the research on galaxies has seen a relentless advance directly connected to the parallel exponential growth of new technologies. Through a series of interviews with distinguished astronomers the editors provide a snapshot of the achievements obtained in understanding galaxies. While many initial questions about their nature have been addressed, many are still open and require new efforts to achieve a solution. The discussions may reveal paradigms worthwhile revisiting. With the help of some of those scientists who have contributed to it, the editors sketch the history of this scientific journey and ask them for inspirations for future directions of galaxy research.

From the Realm of the Nebulae to Populations of Galaxies

From the Realm of the Nebulae to Populations of Galaxies PDF Author: Mauro D'Onofrio
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319310062
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
In order to outline possible future directions in galaxy research, this book wants to be a short stopover, a moment of self-reflection of the past century of achievements in this area. Since the pioneering years of galaxy research in the early 20th century, the research on galaxies has seen a relentless advance directly connected to the parallel exponential growth of new technologies. Through a series of interviews with distinguished astronomers the editors provide a snapshot of the achievements obtained in understanding galaxies. While many initial questions about their nature have been addressed, many are still open and require new efforts to achieve a solution. The discussions may reveal paradigms worthwhile revisiting. With the help of some of those scientists who have contributed to it, the editors sketch the history of this scientific journey and ask them for inspirations for future directions of galaxy research.

The Realm of the Nebulae

The Realm of the Nebulae PDF Author: Edwin Powell Hubble
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300025002
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
No modern astronomer made a more profound contribution to our understanding of the cosmos than did Edwin Hubble, who first conclusively demonstrated that the universe is expanding. Basing his theory on the observation of the change in distanct galaxies, called red shift, Hubble showed that this is a Doppler effect, or alteration in the wavelength of light, resulting from the rapid motion of celestial objects away from Earth. In 1935, Hubble described his principal observations and conclusions in the Silliman lectures at Yale University. These lectures were published the following year as "The Realm of the Nebulae," which quickly became a classic work.

Unveiling Galaxies

Unveiling Galaxies PDF Author: Jean-René Roy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108417019
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
A thought provoking study of the powerful impact of images in guiding astronomers' understanding of galaxies through time.

Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble PDF Author: G.E Christianson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351453866
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae is both the biography of an extraordinary human being and the story of the greatest quest in the history of astronomy since the Copernican revolution. The book is a revealing portrait of scientific genius, an incisive engaging history of ideas, and a shimmering evocation of what we see when gazing at the stars. Born in 1889 and reared in the village of Marshfield, Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble-star athlete, Rhodes Scholar, military officer, and astronomer- became one of the towering figures in twentieth-century science. Hubble worked with the great 100-inch Hooker telescope at California's Mount Wilson Observatory and made a series of discoveries that revolutionized humanity's vision of the cosmos. In 1923 he was able to confirm the existence of other nebulae (now known to be galaxies) beyond our own Milky Way. By the end of the decade, Hubble had proven that the universe is expanding, thus laying the very cornerstone of the big bang theory of creation. It was Hubble who developed the elegant scheme by which the galaxies are classified as ellipticals and spirals, and it was Hubble who first provided reliable evidence that the universe is homogeneous, the same in all directions as far as the telescope can see. An incurable Anglophile with a penchant for tweed jackets and English briars, Hubble, together with his brilliant and witty wife, Grace Burke, became a fixture in Hollywood society in the 1930s and 40s. They counted among their friends Charlie Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Anita Loos, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Walt Disney, Helen Hayes, and William Randolph Hearst. Albert Einstein, a frequent visitor to Southern California, called Hubble's work "beautiful" and modified his equations on relativity to account for the discovery that the cosmos is expanding.

The Milky Way and Beyond: Stars, Nebulae, and Other Galaxies

The Milky Way and Beyond: Stars, Nebulae, and Other Galaxies PDF Author: Britannica Educational Publishing
Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
ISBN: 1615300538
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The Sun is merely one of some 200 billion stars that make up the Milky Way--and the Milky Way is only one of a billion galaxies in the known universe. Packed with fascinating facts and stunning photography, this book examines the Galaxy humans call home and travels light years away, to the domain of phenomena such as the Oort cloud.

A Multifaceted Perspective on Galaxy Evolution

A Multifaceted Perspective on Galaxy Evolution PDF Author: Tim Haines
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A key component of astronomy is the study of how galaxies change over time. Once thought to be static "island universes" today, we know that galaxies are dynamic systems reacting to changes in their internal and external environments in myriad ways. From simple observables like their shapes and colors to the complex interplay of their intricate stellar populations, evolving galaxies contain a wealth of information about their past. Yet, these observables alone are not enough to allow us to determine how these galaxies came to be or what they will become. For that, we need to combine theoretical models assembled from fundamental laboratory physics and apply them to galaxies through the use of state- of-the-art computer simulations. This careful combination of observation and computation has allowed our understanding of galaxy evolution to transition from the simple realm of the nebulae into a substantial field of astronomy. In this thesis, we explore three perspectives of galaxy evolution at different levels of detail- through both observations and computer simulations. We begin with a simple observation: the stars in our galaxy appear to be moving in strange ways. If our Galaxy were living an uneventful life, we would expect all of the stars to be moving in nearly circular orbits with small, but appreciable, vertical motions- much like the horse on a carousel. However, recent surveys of nearby stars have found substantial deviations from such a perfect life. With the stars moving vertically in ways that indicate the galaxy has been rung like a bell. Some observers have posited that interactions with very nearby galaxies like the Sagittarius dwarf may be responsible for these unusual stellar motions. In Chapter 2, we use a simulated version of the Milky Way that is undergoing an interaction with a small companion galaxy to explore how such an interaction can affect the motions of stars near the Sun and what effect this may have on the nearly century-old ii problem known as the Oort Limit. Our own galaxy is but one example of an entire population disk-like galaxies with blue colors due to the presence of newly-formed stars. Opposite this population of "blue cloud" galaxies is the "red sequence" which is made up of spheroidal galaxies with red colors due to having nearly no ongoing star formation. In Chapter 3, we take a detailed look at an exceptionally rare, but quite important subpopulation of galaxies that are thought to be transitioning between the blue cloud and the red sequence through the so-called "green valley." Much like transitional fossils in biology, these galaxies have properties intermediate between both the disk-like galaxies of the blue cloud and the massive spheroids of the red sequence. Although few in number, the presence in the universe provides us with a critical view of the fleeting transitions these galaxies are undergoing to help us unlock the mysteries of how massive galaxies in the universe form. Our understanding of galaxy evolution at every scale relies heavily on computer simulations. In Chapter 4, we approach the subject through the lens of a software developer writing a modern N-body solver used to simulate the gravitational dynamics of galaxies. In particular, we explore how utilizing accelerator hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) can increase both the precision and size of problems that can be solved in galaxy evolution both for today and tomorrow

Quasars at All Cosmic Epochs

Quasars at All Cosmic Epochs PDF Author: Paola Marziani
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889456048
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
The last 50 years have seen a tremendous progress in the research on quasars. From a time when quasars were unforeseen oddities, we have come to a view that considers quasars as active galactic nuclei, with nuclear activity a coming-of-age experienced by most or all galaxies in their evolution. We have passed from a few tens of known quasars of the early 1970s to the 500,000 listed in the catalogue of the Data Release 14 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Not surprisingly, accretion processes on the central black holes in the nuclei of galaxies — the key concept in our understanding of quasars and active nuclei in general — have gained an outstanding status in present-day astrophysics. Accretion produces a rich spectrum of phenomena in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. The power output of highly-accreting quasars has impressive effects on their host galaxies. All the improvement in telescope light gathering and in computing power notwithstanding, we still miss a clear connection between observational properties and theory for quasars, as provided, for example, by the H-R diagram for stars. We do not yet have a complete self-consistent view of nuclear activity with predictive power, as we do for main-sequence stellar sources. At the same time quasars offer many “windows open onto the unknown". On small scales, quasar properties depend on phenomena very close to the black hole event horizon. On large scales, quasars may effect evolution of host galaxies and their circum-galactic environments. Quasars’ potential to map the matter density of the Universe and help reconstruct the Universe’s spacetime geometry is still largely unexploited. The times are ripe for a critical assessment of our present knowledge of quasars as accreting black holes and of their evolution across the cosmic time. The foremost aim of this research topic is to review and contextualize the main observational scenarios following an empirical approach, to present and discuss the accretion scenario, and then to analyze how a closer connection between theory and observation can be achieved, identifying those aspects of our understanding that are still on a shaky terrain and are therefore uncertain knowledge. This research topic covers topics ranging from the nearest environment of the black hole, to the environment of the host galaxies of active nuclei, and to the quasars as markers of the large scale structure and of the geometry of spacetime of the Universe. The spatial domains encompass the accretion disk, the emission and absorption regions, circum-nuclear starbursts, the host galaxy and its interaction with other galaxies. Systematic attention is devoted to some key problems that remain outstanding and are clearly not yet solved: the existence of two quasar classes, radio quiet and radio loud, and in general, the systematic contextualization of quasar properties the properties of the central black hole, the dynamics of the accretion flow in the inner parsecs and the origin of the accretion matter, the quasars’ small and large scale environment, the feedback processes produced by the black hole into the host galaxy, quasar evolutionary patterns from seed black holes to the present-day Universe, and the use of quasars as cosmological standard candles. The timing is appropriate as we are now witnessing a growing body of results from major surveys in the optical, UV X, near and far IR, and radio spectral domains. Radio instrumentation has been upgraded to linear detector — a change that resembles the introduction of CCDs for optical astronomy — making it possible to study radio-quiet quasars at radio frequencies. Herschel and ALMA are especially suited to study the circum-nuclear star formation processes. The new generation of 3D magnetohydrodynamical models offers the prospective of a full physical modeling of the whole quasar emitting regions. At the same time, on the forefront of optical astronomy, applications of adaptive optics to long-slit spectroscopy is yielding unprecedented results on high redshift quasars. Other measurement techniques like 2D and photometric reverberation mapping are also yielding an unprecedented amount of data thanks to dedicated experiments and instruments. Thanks to the instrumental advances, ever growing computing power as well as the coming of age of statistical and analysis techniques, the smallest spatial scales are being probed at unprecedented resolution for wide samples of quasars. On large scales, feedback processes are going out of the realm of single-object studies and are entering into the domain of issues involving efficiency and prevalence over a broad range of cosmic epochs. The Research Topic "Quasars at all Cosmic Epochs" collects a large fraction of the contributions presented at a meeting held in Padova, sponsored jointly by the National Institute for Astrophysics, the Padova Astronomical Observatory, the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padova, and the Instito de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA) of the Consejo Superiór de Investigación Cientifica (CSIC). The meeting has been part of the events meant to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the Padova Observatory.

Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies at High Redshift

Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies at High Redshift PDF Author: Steven Arthur Dawson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581122942
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
As late as 1995, the anticipated widespread population of primeval galaxies remained at large, lurking undetected at unknown redshifts, with undiscovered properties. We present results from our efforts to detect and characterize primeval galaxies by their signature high-redshift Lyman-alpha emission lines utilizing two observational techniques: serendipitous slit spectroscopy and narrowband imaging. By pushing these techniques to their utmost limits, we probe the Lyman-alpha-emitting galaxy population out to redshifts as high as z = 6.5. Galaxies at this epoch reside in a universe which is just 800 million years old, a mere 6% of its current age. As such, this work provides one account of the manner by which observational cosmology has recently shifted from merely marveling at the incredible lookback times implied by the first few high-redshift detections, to the routine assembly of high-redshift datasets designed to address specific astrophysical issues.

Galaxy Formation

Galaxy Formation PDF Author: Malcolm S. Longair
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3662658917
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
Delineating the huge strides taken in cosmology in the past ten years, this much-anticipated second edition of Malcolm Longair's highly appreciated textbook has been extensively and thoroughly updated. It tells the story of modern astrophysical cosmology from the perspective of one of its most important and fundamental problems – how did the galaxies come about? Longair uses this approach to introduce the whole of what may be called "classical cosmology". What’s more, he describes how the study of the origin of galaxies and larger-scale structures in the Universe has provided us with direct information about the physics of the very early Universe.

Galaxy Formation

Galaxy Formation PDF Author: Malcolm Longair
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540734775
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1481

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Book Description
Delineating the huge strides taken in cosmology in the past ten years, this much-anticipated second edition of Malcolm Longair's highly appreciated textbook has been extensively and thoroughly updated. It tells the story of modern astrophysical cosmology from the perspective of one of its most important and fundamental problems – how did the galaxies come about? Longair uses this approach to introduce the whole of what may be called "classical cosmology". What’s more, he describes how the study of the origin of galaxies and larger-scale structures in the Universe has provided us with direct information about the physics of the very early Universe.