Aimed at graduate students and young researchers, this volume presents observational techniques, tools, and models for studying Local Group galaxies.

The Local Group is a small cluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way. At least half of all galaxies in the Universe are thought to belong to similar groups. This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive synthesis of what is known about the Local Group. It begins with a summary of each member galaxy, as well as those galaxies previously regarded as possible members. The book examines the mass, stability and evolution of the Local Group as a whole and includes many important previously unpublished results and conclusions. With clarity, Professor van den Bergh provides a masterful summary of all that is known about the galaxies of the Local Group and their evolution, and expertly places this knowledge in the wider context of on-going studies of galaxy formation and evolution, the cosmic distance scale, and the conditions in the early Universe.

This volume contains the updated and expanded lecture notes of the 37th Saas-Fee Advanced Course organised by the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy. It offers the most comprehensive and up to date review of one of the hottest research topics in astrophysics - how our Milky Way galaxy formed. Joss Bland-Hawthorn & Ken Freeman lectured on Near Field Cosmology - The Origin of the Galaxy and the Local Group. Francesca Matteucci’s chapter is on Chemical evolution of the Milky Way and its Satellites. As designed by the SSAA, books in this series – and this one too – are targeted at graduate and PhD students and young researchers in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. Lecturers and researchers entering the field will also benefit from the book.

This timely book presents an overview of the galaxies within the Local Volume, including the Local Group and our closest neighbours, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. Presented here are the latest results from radio, infrared and optical surveys as well as detailed multi-wavelength studies of individual galaxies. The book aims to provide a vibrant forum for presentations and discussions across a broad range of astrophysical topics.

This is a revised and updated new edition of a classic introductory text on cosmology for undergraduates, also accessible to anyone with school science knowledge. New results from the WMAP mission are included as well as results from Hubble Key Project and High Redshift Supernovae teams.

An astrophysicist recounts how her team of researchers surfed the cosmos to map our local universe—and discovered the Laniakea supercluster, home of the Milky Way. You are here: on Earth, which is part of the solar system, which is in the Milky Way galaxy, which itself is within the extragalactic supercluster Laniakea. And how can we pinpoint our location so precisely? For 20 years, astrophysicist Hélène Courtois surfed the cosmos with international teams of researchers, working to map our local universe. In this book, Courtois describes this quest and the discovery of our home supercluster. Courtois explains that Laniakea (which means “immense heaven” in Hawaiian) is the largest galaxy structure known to which we belong; it is huge, almost too large to comprehend—about 500 million light-years in diameter. It contains about 100,000 large galaxies like our own, and a million smaller ones. Writing accessibly for nonspecialists, Courtois describes the visualization and analysis that allowed her team to map such large structures of the universe. She highlights the work of individual researchers, including portraits of several exceptional women astrophysicists—presenting another side of astronomy. Key ideas are highlighted in text insets; illustrations accompany the main text. The French edition of this book was named the Best Astronomy Book of 2017 by the astronomy magazine Ciel et espace. For this MIT Press English-language edition, Courtois has added descriptions of discoveries made after Laniakea: the cosmic velocity web and the Dipole and Cold Spot repellers. An engaging account of one of the most important discoveries in astrophysics in recent years, her story is a tribute to teamwork and international collaboration.

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.

This is the 2nd edition of a highly successful title on thisfascinating and complex subject. Concentrating primarily on thetheory behind the origin and the evolution of the universe, andwhere appropriate relating it to observation, the new features ofthe this addition include: An overall introduction to the book Two new chapters: Gravitational Lensing and GravitationalWaves Each part has a collection of exercises with solutions tonumerical parts at the end of the book Contains a table of physical constants The addition of a consolidated bibilography

In this fascinating Very Short Introduction, popular science writer John Gribben tells the story of our growing understanding of galaxies, from the days before Galileo to our present-day observations of our many hundreds of millions of galactic neighbors. Not only are galaxies fascinating astronomical structures in themselves, but their study has revealed much of what we know today about the cosmos, providing a window on the Big Bang and the origins of the Universe. Gribben looks at our own "Milky Way" Galaxy in detail, from the different kinds of stars that are born within it, to the origins of its magnificent spiral structure. Perhaps most interesting, Gribben describes the many exciting discoveries have been made about our own galaxy and about those beyond: how a supermassive black hole lurks at the center of every galaxy, how enormous forces are released when galaxies collide, how distant galaxies provide a window on the early Universe, and how the formation of young galaxies shed needed light on the mysteries of Cold Dark Matter. John Gribbin is one of the best-known current popular science writers. His many books include the acclaimed The Universe: A Biography, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, and Science: A History. He has written for many newspapers and regularly contributes to radio and television documentaries and debates, and also writes science fiction novels. He formerly worked for Nature and New Scientist and is presently a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. 1. A Very Short Introduction 2. The Great Debate 3. Our Island 4. The Expanding Universe 5. Across the Universe 6. The Origin of Galaxies 7. The Universe at Large References & Further Reading Index