What is the difference between astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology?
The study of the formation and development of the universe, as defined above, is actually the subject of physical cosmology [1]. Technically, the subject of physical cosmology encompasses all the scientific aspects of cosmology today. However, the phrase "cosmology" is often used to describe the non-scientific (especially philosophical, religious, metaphysical) means people used to understand their role in the universe, especially before the development of the scientific method
[1] Physical cosmology research is also quite different from traditional astronomy research. While it often uses experimental data to inform its hypotheses, many physical cosmologists have also theorized cosmological models that will probably never be confirmable by empirical methods (which does not mean that they're useless - they're still extremely interesting in themselves). See http://genesismission.jpl
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere (such as the cosmic background radiation). It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the formation and development of the universe.
The study of the formation and development of the universe, as defined above, is actually the subject of physical cosmology [1]. Technically, the subject of physical cosmology encompasses all the scientific aspects of cosmology today. However, the phrase "cosmology" is often used to describe the non-scientific (especially philosophical, religious, metaphysical) means people used to understand their role in the universe, especially before the development of the scientific method
Though the word cosmology is recent (first used in 1730 in Christian Wolff's Cosmologia Generalis), the study of the universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism, and religion. (See Cosmogony for the study of origins of the Universe and Cosmography for the features of the Universe.)
[1] Physical cosmology research is also quite different from traditional astronomy research. While it often uses experimental data to inform its hypotheses, many physical cosmologists have also theorized cosmological models that will probably never be confirmable by empirical methods (which does not mean that they're useless - they're still extremely interesting in themselves). See http://genesismission.jpl
Cosmology is pursued like most of today’s scientific research: develop a hypothesis or model, perform experiments, and produce data that can be validated or challenged by other experimentalists. However, cosmology suffers in comparison to other sciences in the sense that more models exist than do experimental facts, since the latter are so difficult to obtain when one deals with the universe as a whole. Consequently, cosmology is very much a speculative science requiring assumptions, inferences, and enormous extrapolations in time and space.
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