Galaxy Formation and Transformation

Dr. Alfonso Aragon-Salamanca will explain that, although we still have much to learn, in recent decades we have made significant progress towards understanding how galaxies form and evolve. Most astronomers now accept a cosmological model in which dark matter and dark energy determine the growth of the large-scale structure of the Universe. The expectation is that the galaxies we observe are "built" on top of these dark-matter structures, but a significant challenge is to explain the huge variety of galaxies we observe. In this lecture, Prof. Aragon-Salamanca will present some current ideas on how galaxies are formed and transformed, together with several recent observational results obtained by his team on how the environment where galaxies live affects their properties.