Galaxies: A Beginner’s Guide to Exploring Galaxies

Collisions, Cannibals and the Cosmic Web The universe is teeming with beauty beyond what the human eye can detect, and only relatively recent advances in technology have allowed us to capture it in all its glory. Galaxies explores the Universe on an expansive scale, showcasing and examining the gargantuan structures of stars, planets, gas and dark matter that populate our cosmos. Such structures do not exist in isolation; their interactions play a pivotal role in their evolution. We witness galaxies swallowing their smaller counterparts whole in acts of galactic cannibalism, growing ever larger in the process. When two or more massive galaxies collide head-on in spectacular fashion, the destruction unleashed leads to the creation of a new generation of stars as two become one. So why do galaxies cannibalise each other? When will the Milky Way meet its end? And how many distant galactic superstructures lie beyond our gaze? Galaxies reveals all of this and more in a compact and accessibly informative way. From the earliest sketches and black-and-white photography of the first discovered galaxies, all the way to observing distant megastructures in our own back gardens, galaxies persist in intriguing and confusing us in equal measure. The mystery of their origins, the abundance of dark matter within them, and the true nature of the supermassive black holes at their centres all continue to push the limits of our understanding.