Evolution of Stars and Galaxies

Galaxies surrounding us in the nearby Universe exhibit diversity morphologies, luminosity, color and mass. There are galaxies one hundred times brighter than our Milky Way, and others hundreds to hundred thousands times fainter. They display a various shapes - spheroidal, disk-like, or no regular structure -, and their stellar dynamics ranges from random motion to ordered rotation. Why do galaxies exhibit such a variety? Our quest is to go back in time and reconstruct physical mechanisms that led to present-day galaxies and to explain the properties of their matter and the Universe as a whole.

While the early Greeks thought stars to be non-changing objects that only travel in space, we now understand that stars form in the collapse of molecular clouds before undergoing many different stages of evolution. One of the most important methods to further understand stars is asteroseismology - the study of stellar oscillations. In this talk, I will give an introduction into pulsating stars, the earliest phases of stellar evolution, and how we can combine numerical methods with data from space telescopes to pierce deep into the stellar interiors.