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Cosmological Structure Formation

LCDM is remarkably successful in predicting the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure, and LCDM parameters have been determined with only mild tensions between different types of observations. Hydrodynamical simulations starting from cosmological initial conditions are increasingly able to capture the complex interactions between dark matter and baryonic matter in galaxy formation. Simulations with relatively low resolution now succeed in describing the overall galaxy population. For example, the EAGLE simulation in volumes up to 100 cubic Mpc reproduces the observed local galaxy mass function nearly as well as semi-analytic models. It once seemed that galaxies are pretty smooth, that they generally grow in size as they evolve, and that they are a combination of disks and spheroids. But recent HST observations combined with high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations are showing that most star-forming galaxies are very clumpy; that galaxies often undergo compaction which reduces their radius and increases their central density; and that most lower-mass star-forming galaxies are not spheroids or disks but are instead elongated when their centers are dominated by dark ma