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Astronomy studies celestial objects and phenomena, including stars, planets and galaxies. Astrometry measures their positions and motion; astrophysics uses physics to explain their properties and behaviour.

Much of astronomy begins with incoming light. An image tells us which direction the light arrived from, rather than directly providing the source's three-dimensional position. Two stars close together on the sky may be very far apart in space. The celestial sphere organizes these viewing directions; locating an object on it is a different task from measuring how far away that object is. Repeated observations turn this limitation into an opportunity: the changing direction of light contains evidence about both Euclidean distance and motion.

The particularly satisfying combination is stellar parallax with proper motion. The first supplies a geometric Euclidean distance, while the second measures how rapidly the viewing direction changes after accounting for the observer's annual motion. Together they give a transverse speed, connecting tiny angles on an image to kilometres travelled each second. This bridge from a flat sky map to moving stars is one reason astrometry matters to the study of the Milky Way.

Astrophysics uses physics to explain stars, planets, galaxies, and their electromagnetic radiation; cosmology extends the questions to the universe as a whole. Much of its evidence arrives as light. The challenge is to infer the source's physical properties from what reaches an observer: a bright star might be nearby, unusually luminous, or both. Stellar parallax and observed radiative flux make this distinction quantitative.

This is an inverse problem. A forward problem predicts observations from a source model and the intervening radiative transfer; the inverse problem works backwards from observations to possible models. A spectral line can constrain chemical elements, temperature, and motion through the Doppler effect, but its strength also depends on the stellar atmosphere. Combining different measurements is therefore more informative than interpreting brightness alone. The attraction is that a tiny change in the direction of light can supply a distance, turning received radiative flux into intrinsic luminosity. ^[ref].

Cosmic shear is the statistically correlated lensing shear of distant galaxies produced by the intervening large-scale matter distribution. Correlations across angle and source redshift constrain clustering, the growth of structure and distance geometry, thereby testing dark matter and dark energy. Intrinsic galaxy alignments and measurement errors must be separated from the lensing signal.

The cosmological principle assumes that the universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large spatial scales. It applies to a coarse-grained description, not to each galaxy or local void. Combined with the Copernican principle, cosmological isotropy around us supports a homogeneous description rather than a specially centred model. It motivates an FRW metric, whose expansion is governed by a few time-dependent quantities. Observations sample only a finite past light cone, so they support this hypothesis without proving global spatial homogeneity beyond the observed region.

A damped Lyman-alpha system has a sufficiently high neutral-hydrogen column density that the Lorentzian wings of its Voigt profile are conspicuous. These wings come from the finite lifetime of the excited atomic state, not from unusually high gas temperature. Damped systems usually trace substantial neutral reservoirs associated with galaxies.

A dwarf spheroidal galaxy is a faint, diffuse, largely pressure-supported galaxy with little gas. A large dynamical mass-to-light ratio commonly indicates dark matter, subject to assumptions of equilibrium, member selection, and binary-star corrections. Its stellar light and total mass need not share one density profile.

For a nearby Euclidean survey with limiting flux $f_{\min }$, a galaxy of luminosity $L$ is detectable out to $d_{\max }=\sqrt{L/(4\pi f_{\min })}$. Its accessible volume is therefore proportional to $L^{3/2}$. With a Schechter function $\varphi (L)\propto L^{\alpha }{e}^{-L/L_{\ast }}$, counts per logarithmic interval are proportional to $L^{\alpha +5/2}{e}^{-L/L_{\ast }}$ and peak at $(\alpha +5/2)L_{\ast }$ when $\alpha >-5/2$. This selection suppresses faint objects relative to a volume-limited census; finite survey boundaries and cosmological evolution modify the simple law.

A galactic bulge is a centrally concentrated stellar population in a galaxy, usually thicker than its disk. Its origin, rotation and random stellar motions can differ from those of the disk; bulge light is often described by a Sérsic profile.

A galactic disk is a flattened stellar or gaseous component of a galaxy, commonly supported mainly by ordered rotation. Its radial mass profile determines its galaxy rotation curve; thickness, truncation and external forces also matter. A galactic disk need not be an exponential galactic disk, and its neutral-gas absorption radius need not equal a stellar scale length.

A galaxy of characteristic radius $R$ and velocity dispersion $\sigma$ has crossing time $R/\sigma$. Gravitational balance gives $GM/R\sim {\sigma }^2$, hence $t_{\mathrm{dyn}}\sim GM/{\sigma }^3$. A numerical coefficient depends on the radius definition, density profile, and whether one uses a crossing, orbital, or free-fall time; these are not identical clocks.

The differential Newtonian gravitational field of a galaxy across a smaller bound system. Its tidal tensor can slowly change the angular momentum of distant comets, changing their periapses and their access to planetary encounters.

A galaxy cluster is a gravitationally bound collection of galaxies, diffuse gas and dark matter. Much of its ordinary matter can reside in hot intracluster gas, visible through thermal bremsstrahlung and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. The two signals weight the electron density differently, making the cluster useful both as a structure-formation probe and, with a geometrical model, as a distance indicator.

The mean number of other galaxies within distance $R$ of a randomly chosen galaxy is the integral of its conditional number density. A random location instead has mean count $4\pi \bar{n}{R}^3/3$. For a power law $\xi (r)=(r_0/r{)}^{\gamma }$, the extra count is $4\pi \bar{n}{r}_0^{\gamma }{R}^{3-\gamma }/(3-\gamma )$ when $\gamma <3$. The central galaxy is excluded; including it adds one. This distinction matters even when the unconditional mean number density is spatially uniform.

A galaxy merger combines two or more galaxies into a remnant. Their orbital angular momentum and energy are redistributed into internal stellar and halo motions, escaping matter, and, when present, dissipative gas. A bound pair produced by tidal capture of galaxies need not coalesce immediately.

The observed size distribution of galaxies changes with epoch at a given galaxy stellar mass. Growth of an individual object and changes in which objects enter a selected sample both contribute. Minor galaxy mergers can deposit stars at large radii, increasing size while adding relatively little mass; stellar mass loss and dissipative evolution provide other mechanisms.

For a homogeneous isotropic point process of galaxies with mean number density $\bar{n}$, the galaxy two-point correlation function gives the excess pair probability at distinct positions. Dividing the factorial pair density by the probability of a central galaxy gives conditional neighbouring-galaxy density $\bar{n}[1+\xi (r)]$. Choosing a central location uniformly in volume does not perform this conditioning.

The gas fraction of a galaxy is commonly $\mu =M_g/(M_g+M_s)$, using the gas and stellar masses remaining in the system. In a leaky-box model of galactic chemical evolution, it differs from the fraction $g=M_g/M_{g,0}$ of the initial gas reservoir. For an initially star-free box with outflow rate $\alpha {\dot{M}}_s$, $\mu =(1+\alpha )g/(1+\alpha g)$. These different fractions give different-looking metallicity formulae and effective yields.