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by Malcolm S. Longair (Author)
Accounting for the enormous and amazing development cosmology has made in the past ten years, the long awaited second edition of this highly appraised 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? The author uses this approach to introduce the whole of what may be called "classical cosmology". Moreover he describes how the study the origin of galaxies and larger-scale structures in the Universe has provided us with unique and direct information about the physics of the very early Universe. The material is presented in an informal pedagogical manner, emphasizing the underlying physical content of the subject, and the book is destined to become a favorite text for students.
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This second edition of Galaxy Formation is an up-to-date text on astrophysical cosmology, expounding the structure of the classical cosmological models from a contemporary viewpoint. This forms the background to a detailed study of the origin of structure and galaxies in the Universe. The derivations of many of the most important results are derived by simple physical arguments which illuminate the results of more advanced treatments. A very wide range of observational data is brought to bear upon these problems, including the most recent results from WMAP, the Hubble Space Telescope, galaxy surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, studies of Type 1a supernovae, and many other observations.
