A Class object is sort of a meta object describing the class of an object. It is used mostly with the reflection capabilities of Java. You can think of it like a "blueprint" of the actual class. E.g. you have a class Car like this:
public class Car {
public String brand;
}
You can then construct a Class object which describes your "Car" class.
Class myCarClass = Class.forName("Car");
Now you can do all sorts of querying on your Car class on that Class object:
myCarClass.getName() - returns "Car"
myCarClass.getDeclaredField("brand") - returns a Field object describing the "brand" field
and so on. Every java object has a method getClass() which returns the Class object describing the Class of the Java object. So you could do something like:
Car myCar = new Car();
Class myCarClass = myCar.getClass();
This also works for objects you don't know, e.g objects you get from the outside:
public void tellMeWhatThisObjectsClassIs(Object obj) {
System.out.println(obj.getClass().getName());
}
You could feed this method any java object and it will print the actual class of the object you have given to it.
When working with Java, most of the time you don't need to worry about Class objects. They have some handy use cases though. E.g. they allow you to programmatically instanciate objects of a certain class, which is used often for object serialization and deserialization (e.g. converting Java Objects to XML and back, well mostly back).
Class myCarClass = Class.forName("Car");
Car myCar = myCarClass.newInstance(); // is roughly equivalent to = new Car();
You could also use it to find out all declared fields or methods of your class etc, which is very useful in certain cases. So e.g. if your method gets handed an unknown object and you need to know more about it, like if it imlements some interface etc, the Class class is your friend here.
So long story short, the Class, Field, Method, etc. classes which are in the java.lang.reflect package allow you to analyze your defined classes, methods, fields, create new instances of them, call methods all kinds of other stuff and they allow you to do this dynamically at runtime.