Related papers: Cosmic rays and the primordial gas
We study the implications of primordial magnetic fields for the thermal and ionization history of the post-recombination era. In particular we compute the effects of dissipation of primordial magnetic fields owing to ambipolar diffusion and…
Water ice is abundant both astrophysically, for example in molecular clouds, and in planetary systems. The Kuiper belt objects, many satellites of the outer solar system, the nuclei of comets and some planetary rings are all known to be…
Warm dark matter is consistent with the observations of the large-scale structure, and it can also explain the cored density profiles on smaller scales. However, it has been argued that warm dark matter could delay the star formation. This…
HD dominates the cooling of primordial clouds with enhanced ionization, e.g. shock-heated clouds in structure formation or supernova remnants, relic HII regions of Pop III stars, and clouds with cosmic-ray (CR) irradiation. There, the…
The absence of large cooling flows in cool core clusters appears to require self-regulated energy feedback by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) but the exact heating mechanism has not yet been identified. Here, we analyse whether a combination…
Context. Cosmic ray particles that hit interstellar grains in dark molecular cores may induce whole-grain heating. The high temperature of a CR-heated grain allows energy barriers for bulk diffusion and reactions to be overcome.…
We investigate the ability of primordial gas clouds to retain molecular hydrogen (H_2) during the initial phase of the reionization epoch. We find that before the Stromgren spheres of the individual ionizing sources overlap, the UV…
We analyze the processes relevant for star formation in a model with dark matter in the form of sterile neutrinos. Sterile neutrino decays produce an X-ray background radiation that has a two-fold effect on the collapsing clouds of…
Galactic cosmic rays (CR) are particles presumably accelerated in supernova remnant shocks that propagate in the interstellar medium up to the densest parts of molecular clouds, losing energy and their ionisation efficiency because of the…
Primordial chemistry began, at the recombination epoch, when the adiabatic expansion caused the temperature of the radiation to fall below 4000K. The chemistry of the early Universe involves the elements hydrogen, its isotope deuterium,…
Cooling is the main process leading to the condensation of gas in the dark matter potential wells and consequently to star and structure formation. In a metal-free environment, the main available coolants are H, He, H$_2$ and HD; once the…
We study the evolution of gas in HII regions around the first stars after the death of the exciting stars. If the first star in a small halo dies without supernova (SN), subsequent star formation is possible in the same halo. We thus…
Numerical simulations show the formation of self-gravitating primordial disks during the assembly of the first structures in the Universe, in particular during the formation of Pop.~III and supermassive stars. Their subsequent evolution is…
Galactic cosmic rays are a ubiquitous source of ionisation of the interstellar gas, competing with UV and X-ray photons as well as natural radioactivity in determining the fractional abundance of electrons, ions and charged dust grains in…
This paper deals with the cosmic-ray penetration into molecular clouds and with the related gamma--ray emission. High energy cosmic rays interact with the dense gas and produce neutral pions which in turn decay into two gamma rays. This…
The role of cosmic rays generated by supernovae and young stars has very recently begun to receive significant attention in studies of galaxy formation and evolution due to the realization that cosmic rays can efficiently accelerate…
The collapse of the primordial gas in the density regime $\sim 10^{8}\hbox{--}10^{10}$ cm$^{-3}$ is controlled by the three-body $\rm H_2$ formation process, in which the gas can cool faster than free-fall time $\hbox{--}$ a condition…
The thermochemistry of H2 and HD in non-collapsed, non-reionized primordial gas up to the end of the dark age is investigated with recent radiation-matter and chemical reaction rates taking into account the efficient coolant HD, and the…
We examine in detail the recent proposal that extreme Cosmic-Ray-Dominated-Regions (CRDRs) characterize the ISM of galaxies during events of high-density star formation, fundamentally altering its initial conditions (Papadopoulos 2010).…
The molecular gas content of local early-type galaxies is constrained and discussed in relation to their evolution. First, as part of the Atlas3D survey, we present the first complete, large (260 objects), volume-limited single-dish survey…