History of Galaxy Evolution

I personally understand something much better if I understand its history. In the study of galaxy evolution I found the textbook titled "Galaxy Formation and Evolution" by Mo, van den Bosch and White to be a very interesting book. In the introduction they have compiled a very nice history of how we have come to understand so much of galaxy formation. Like the rest of the book, they have written this section beautifully and I advise anyone interested to have a look; it's only 10 pages!

To understand better, I pulled out all the dates and events and set them to different colors

Before 20th century, Structure Formation, Cosmology, ΛCDM, Galaxy Formation, Observational Techniques

Let me just mention some points before the table:

Because it becomes too crowded, in cases where the authors of major papers were more than two people, I have only written the first. I will link the names to the papers in due time...
In Cases that the book had mentioned more than one paper for one fact, I just wrote the first

This table was initially based on Mo, van den Bosch and White's text book, as I have studied more and becoming more and more familiar with other historically imporant works and their significance, especially those relating to my research, I will be adding them to this list.

1771	Messier	Before 20th century	Cataloged about 100 non-stellar objects
1864	Herschel	Before 20th century	General Catalogue of Galaxies: 5079 objects
1888	Dreyer	Before 20th century	New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars: about 15000 objects
1902	Jeans	Structure Formation	Structures can form via gravitational instability
1916	Einstein	Cosmology	General Relativity
1920	Shapley Curtis	Cosmology	Great debate on whether the Nebula are separate islands or not
1922	Friedmann	Cosmology	Solved Einstein's equations for a homogeneous universe
1925	Hubble	Cosmology	Galaxies are very far objects; Galaxies are separate islands
1929	Hubble	Cosmology	Speed of more distant galaxies is more
1933	Zwicky	ΛCDM	Velocity in clusters needed 400times more mass than visible
1936	Hubble	Galaxy Formation	Classification of galaxies in the Hubble Sequence
1937	Zwicky	ΛCDM	Large invisible cluster mass should produce lensing
1939	Gamow Teller	Structure Formation	Application of Jeans criterion to an expanding universe; with the result that perturbation growth is power-law in time, rather than exponential as for a static back ground
1948	Gamow Alpher	Cosmology	Initial model for Primordial Nucleosynthesis
1949	Hoyle	Structure Formation	Purturbations might gain angluar momentum from their neighbors
1957	Hoyle Fowler	Cosmology	Heavy elements can only be made in stars
1959	Schmidt	Galaxy Formation	Star formation efficiency appears to scale as the squared of density
1962	Eggen	Galaxy Formation	Galaxies form from the collapse of gas clouds; Difference in elliptical and spiral reflects the rapidity of star formation
1964	Hoyle Taylor	Cosmology	Explanation of Helium abundance from Big Bang
1965	Penzias Wilson	Cosmology	Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background
1965	Peebles	Structure Formation	Isothermal initial conditions: Structure forms Bottom-up
1966	Gershtein Zel'dovich	ΛCDM	Exotic elementary particles like massive neutrinos (HDM) constitute the dark matter
1967	Wagoner	Cosmology	Detailed calculation of a complete network of nuclear reactions; Helium 3, Deuterium and Lithium
1968	Misner	Cosmology	Problem of horizons: different parts of the universe we see today were never in casual contact
1968	Silk	Structure Formation	Adiabatic initial conditions: Structure forms Top-down
1970	Harrison	Structure Formation	Harrison-Zel'dovich initial function spectrum: Structure on every scale has the same dimensionless amplitude
1970	Doroshkehvich	Structure Formation	A linear perturbation analysis of the hoyle process carried out in full generality
1970	Zel'dovich	Structure Formation	He describes the initial non-linear collapse of a coherent purturbation of the cosmic density field; 2D pancake
1971	Peebles	Structure Formation	Numerical simulations of the hoyle-doroshkevech processes
1972	Gunn Gott	Structure Formation	Simple spherically symmetric model to describle the growth, turn around (from the general expansion), collapse and virialization of a purturbation
1972	Toomre Toomre	Galaxy Formation	Using simple numerical simulations they demonstrated convincingly that some of the extraordinary structures seen in peculiar galaxies could be produced by tidal interactionds between two normal spirals. Based on their frequency and interaction signitures, they argued that elliptical galaxies could be merger remnants
1973	Roberts Rots	ΛCDM	Using 21cm and optical observations, they showed that the velocity towards the outer galaxy radius does not fall off
1974	Press Schechter	Structure Formation	Applied the Gun & Gutt perturbation growth to a gaussian initial density field
1974	Ostriker Einasto	ΛCDM	A halo is needed to understand the motion of satellites around the milky way
1975	Bertola Capaccioli	Galaxy Formation	Showed the absence of highly flattened ellipticals in the Larson model
1976	Gutt Thuan	Galaxy Formation	Protogalaxies associated with the highest initial density perturbations would complete star formation earlier and become ellipticals
1976	Larson	Galaxy Formation	That it is indeed the ratio of the star-formation time to the dissipation/cooling time which determines whether the system turns into an elliptical or a spiral. Also emphasised the importance of feedback processes
1977	Silk	Galaxy Formation	Galaxies can form effectively only in systems where the cooling time is comparable to or shorter than the collapse time, which leads to a characteristic scale of ~10^(12) Solar masses.
1977	Illingworth	Galaxy Formation	Many bright ellipticals show little or no rotation in contrast to the Larson model
1978	White Rees	ΛCDM	Two stage theory for galaxy formation: Dark halos form first through hierarchical clustering; the luminous content of galaxies then results from cooling and condensation of gas within thre Press & Schechter model for the growth of non-linear structure. They used Larson's model for feedback processes
1978	White Rees	Galaxy Formation	Showed the absence of highly flattened ellipticals in the Larson model
1978	White	Galaxy Formation	Simulations showed that mergers of two spheroids produces remnants with density profiles that agree with observed ellipticals
1979	Dicke Peebles	Cosmology	Problem of flatness: Why the universe as stayed so flat
1979	Efstathiou Jones	Structure Formation	Clumps formed through gravitational collapse in a cosmological context typically acquire about 15% of the angluar momentum needed for full rotational support
1979	Tremain Gunn	ΛCDM	Based on the Pauli exclusion principle they showed that galaxy halos cannot be made of neutrinos with masses as small as 30eV
1980	Lyubimov Reines	ΛCDM	Announced the detection of mass for the electron neutrino at a level of cosmological interest (about 30eV); Not conclusive
1980	Bond Sato	ΛCDM	detailed study of structure formation with massive neutrinos as dark matter
1980	Fall & Efstathiou	Galaxy Formation	Developed a model of disk formation in dark matter halos incorporating the angular momentum expected from tidal torques and showed that many properties of observed galaxies can be understood in this way.
1980	Ostriker	Galaxy Formation	Observed giant ellipticals which are dense and can have velocity dispersions as high as 300km/s cannot be formed through mergers
1981	Guth	Cosmology	Introduced inflation: Early period of exponential expansion, to solve the flatness and curvature problems
1981	Gerhard	Galaxy Formation	Simulations on mergers of disk galaxies that create ellipticals
1982	Linde Steinhardt	Cosmology	Revised inflation
1982	Howking	Structure Formation	Quantum fluctuations in the inflation scalar field could be the source of the Harrison - Zel'dovich spectrum: in the simplest form perturbations are adiabatic and the initial density field is Gaussian.
1982	Peebles	ΛCDM	Consideration of a variety of Warm and Cold Dark Matter models
1983	Kaiser	ΛCDM	Galaxies form at the deepest dark matter potential wells
1983	Efstathiou & Silk	Galaxy Formation	In the two stage theory, they argued that cool gas can settle in a rotationally supported disk in a fraction of the hubble time, whereas with out the dark matter halo it would take too long.
1984	White	ΛCDM	Simulations of structure formation in a neutrino dominted universe showed that they cannot make galaxies with out making highly dense clusters at the same time.
1984	Blumenthal	Galaxy Formation	Biased galaxy formation: suggesting that disk galaxies may be associated with density peaks of typical heights in the CDM density field, while giant ellipticals may be associated with higher density peaks.
1985	Davis	ΛCDM	Simulations of the CDM model and how the can create a good match to the observed clustering of galaxies
1990	Maddox Efstathiou	ΛCDM	APM galaxy survey, showed that the standard CDM model predicts less clustering on large scales
1991	Katz Gunn	Galaxy Formation	Three-dimensional, hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation: They focused on the collapse of a homogeneous, uniformly rotating sphere.
1991	White Frenk	Galaxy Formation	Semi-analytical models of galaxy formation: uses knowledge about the structure and assembly history of CDM halos to model the gravitational potential wells within which galaxies form and evolve , treating all the relevant physical processes (cooling, star formation, feedback, dynamical friction , etc.)
1992	Smooth	Structure Formation	Anisotropy in the CMB was detected with COBE
1992	Davis	ΛCDM	MDM: Mixed Dark Matter: 30%HDM, 70%CDM; Ultimately too slow galaxy formation
1992	Warren	Galaxy Formation	CDM halo angular-momentum distributions
1993	Lacey Cole	Galaxy Formation	Merger Histories in the CDM halos
1994	Ratra	ΛCDM	OCDM: Open CDM: CDM only 30% of critical density; Ultimately problems showed in matching perturbation amplitudes with COBE
1994	Dodelson	ΛCDM	τCDM: Enhanced Radiation background was proposed for more clustering, but ultimately too slow galaxy formation
1996	Mo White	Galaxy Formation	Spatial Clustering in CDM halos
1997	Navarro	Galaxy Formation	CDM halos density profiles
1998	Granavich	ΛCDM	Measurement of cosmic acceleration in expansion with Type Ia supernovae
1998	Moore	Galaxy Formation	Substructure in the CDM halos
1999	Perlmutter	ΛCDM	Measurement of cosmic constants Ω and Λ, using Type Ia supernovae
2000	Brinchmann & Ellis	Observational	New method of photometric redshift through fitting a modeled Spectral Enegery Distribution with discrete photmetric observations in different wavelengths.
2000	de Bernardis	ΛCDM	The Universe is flat
2002	Jing Sato	Galaxy Formation	CDM Halo Shapes
2003	Bennett	Galaxy Formation	COBE results confirmed and dramatically refined by WMAP
2003	Bruzual & Charlot	Observational	New software for stellar population synthesis of galaxies that enabled the easy fitting of observed galaxy spectra with those of a hypothetical galaxy.
2003	Spregel	ΛCDM	Determination of cosmological parameters using WMAP

Updated: June 1st, 2011

Tohoku University Astronomical Institute, 6-3 Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Japan, 980-8578
akhlaghi :a:t: astr.tohoku.ac.jp, Office: Physics A; 838, +81-80-3335-9474