Related papers: Where can we really find the First Stars' Remnants…
We examine the nature of kpc-scale clumps seen in high-redshift galaxies using a suite of cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. We identify rest-frame UV clumps in mock HST images smoothed to 500 pc resolution, and compare them with…
At a conference devoted to ever deeper surveys hunting for ever more distant galaxies, I posed a question for which a concensus view has been difficult to reach: `Is there evidence for, or can we rule out, a significant population of…
The advent of 8m-class telescopes has made galaxies at 1 < z < 4 relatively easy to detect and study. This is a brief and incomplete review of some of the recent results to emerge from surveys at these redshifts. After describing different…
The formation environment of stars in massive stellar clusters is similar to the environment of stars forming in galaxies at a redshift of 1 - 3, at the peak star formation rate density of the Universe. As massive clusters are still forming…
There is much debate on how high-mass star formation varies with environment, and whether the sparsest star-forming environments are capable of forming massive stars. To address this issue, we have observed eight apparently isolated OB…
(abridged) We perform 12 extremely high resolution adaptive mesh refinement cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of Population III star formation in a Lambda CDM universe, varying the box size and large-scale structure, to understand…
Even 10 billion years ago, the cores of the first galaxy clusters are often found to host a characteristic population of massive galaxies with already suppressed star formation. Here we search for distant cluster candidates at z~2 using…
The Quintuplet, one of three massive stellar clusters in the Galactic center, is located about 30pc in projection from Sagittarius A*. Based on near-infrared K-band spectra we determine temperatures and luminosities for all stars in our…
We investigate the nature of star formation in gas-rich galaxies at $z > 7$ forming in a markedly overdense region, in the whereabouts of a massive virialized halo already exceeding $10^{12}$ M$_{\odot}$. We find that not only the primary…
The star formation history of nearby early-type galaxies is investigated via numerical modelling. Idealized hydrodynamical N-body simulations with a star formation prescription are used to study the minor merger process between a giant…
Star-forming galaxies constitute the majority of galaxies with stellar masses >10^10 M_Sun/h^2 at z~2 and dominate the star-formation rate density of the Universe at this early epoch. It is thus critical to understand their origins,…
Using a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation of a galaxy of similar mass to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), we examine the predicted characteristics of its lowest metallicity populations. In particular, we emphasise the spatial…
We investigate the galaxy population in simulated proto-cluster regions using a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, coupled to merger trees extracted from N-body simulations. We select the most massive clusters at redshift $z=0$ from…
We explore the evolved galaxy population in the proto-clusters around four high-z radio galaxies at 2<~z<~3 based on wide-field near-infrared imaging. Three of the four fields are known proto-clusters as demonstrated by overdensities of…
We present a new method of tracking and characterizing the environment in which galaxies and their associated circumgalactic medium evolve. We use a structure finding algorithm we developed to self-consistently parse and follow the…
We discuss the link between dark matter halos hosting the first PopIII stars and the rare, massive, halos that are generally considered to host bright quasars at high redshift z~6. The main question that we intend to answer is whether the…
We present a comprehensive theoretical study, within a fully realistic semi-analytical framework, of the photometric properties of early-type progenitors in the redshift range 0<z<1, as a function of the luminosity and local environment of…
We investigate the possibility that present-day galaxies and their dark matter haloes contain a population of massive black holes (MBHs) that form by hierarchical merging of the black hole remnants of the first stars in the Universe. Some…
In the standard model of cosmology ($\Lambda$CDM) the first stars, star clusters, and galaxies are expected to have formed in low-mass dark matter halos at high redshifts ($z \sim 6 - 30$). Attempts to predict the properties and abundances…
We review the current status of knowledge concerning the early phases of star formation during cosmic dawn. This includes the first generations of stars forming in the lowest mass dark matter halos in which cooling and condensation of gas…