Trying to catch up on recent developments in galaxy formation? I can heartily recommend an excellent review article on the subject by Richard Ellis which you can find on the arXiv here. The abstract reads:
I present written notes from three lectures given at the 54th Saas-Fee Advanced Course of the Swiss Society of Astrophysics and Astronomy in January 2025 entitled “Galaxies and Black Holes in the First Billion Years as seen by the JWST”. I focused my lectures on progress in studies of cosmic reionisation, the properties of galaxies in the reionisation era, topics related to the redshift frontier and the search for Population III stars. The lectures were given to graduate students in astrophysics and cover both pedagogical material as well as observational results from the first two and half years of JWST science operations. The pace of discovery with JWST is, of course, rapid and so my lectures discuss long-term goals, analysis methods and their assumptions and limitations in the hope that the underlying material will retain value in the near future. In this written version, the visual material is that presented at Saas-Fee in January 2025 but I have provided updates on progress from the literature up to August 2025. The material is aimed at early career researchers and should not be considered as a scholarly review of the entire JWST literature on high redshift galaxies.
It’s quite a long article (65 pages) but nicely written and well worth reading, as it is full of information about recent advances as well as historical insights. Talking of which, there’s a picture on page 41 taken at a meeting in Durham in 1988 called The Epoch of Galaxy Formation that I attended while I was still a graduate student:
Richard Ellis himself is in the front row, left of centre with light-coloured trousers, checked shirt and hands in pockets. I’m in the picture too, but I’ll leave it up to you to find me!
A poll was held among the delegates at that meeting about various questions to do with galaxy formation. The majority opinions revealed by these votes nearly all turned out to be utterly wrong! That’s progress, I guess…
In the Dark 