Related papers: The New Frontier: Galactic-Scale Star Formation
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
The high redshift observations of galaxies now becoming available from the Hubble Space Telescope and from large ground based telescopes are opening fresh windows on galaxy formation. Semianalytic models of galaxy formation provide us with…
The intensity of the Cosmic Far-IR Background and the strong evolution of galaxies in the far-IR to mm wavelength range demonstrate that the bulk of starlight emitted during the early phases of galaxy evolution was reprocessed by dust.…
The determination of accurate distances to star-forming regions are discussed in the broader historical context of astronomical distance measurements. We summarize recent results for regions within 1 kpc and present perspectives for the…
The major questions relevant to star and planet formation are: What controls the rate, efficiency, spatial clustering, multiplicity, and initial mass function of star formation, now and in the past? What are the major feedback mechanisms…
The last decade of research on elliptical galaxies has produced a wealth of new information concerning both their detailed structure and their global scaling relations. We review the old and new results about isophote shapes and…
Spiral galaxies offer a unique opportunity to study the role of star formation in galaxy evolution and to test various theoretical star formation schemes. I review some recent relevant work on the evolution of spiral galaxies. Detailed…
Observations of high-z galaxies and gamma-ray bursts now allow for empirical studies during reionization. However, even deep surveys see only the brightest galaxies at any epoch and must extrapolate to arbitrary lower limits to estimate the…
To understand the formation of stellar groups, one must first document carefully the birth pattern within real clusters and associations. In this study of Taurus-Auriga, we combine pre-main-sequence ages from our own evolutionary tracks…
Ever deeper and wider lookback surveys have led to a fairly robust outline of the cosmic star formation history, which culminated around z~2 -- a period often nicknamed "cosmic noon." Our knowledge about star-forming galaxies at these…
In this review I will describe a number of recent advances in extragalactic astronomy. First of all I will describe our current best estimates of the star formation history of the Universe. Then I will describe measurements of local…
Analyzing global starburst properties in various kinds of starburst and post-starburst galaxies and relating them to the properties of the star cluster populations they form, I explore the conditions for the formation of massive, compact,…
It is an obvious statement that all the galaxies we see today in and around our Local Group have been forming and evolving for a significant fraction of the age of the Universe. It is not a great leap of logic to further state that the…
The deepest multi-wavelength surveys now provide measurements of star formation in galaxies out to z>1, and allow to reconstruct its history for large parts of the galaxy population. I review recent studies, which have consistently revealed…
Understanding galaxy formation is one of the most pressing issues in cosmology. We review the current status of galaxy formation from both an observational and a theoretical perspective, and summarise the prospects for future advances.
The star formation history (SFH) of galaxies allow us to investigate when galaxies formed their stars and assembled their mass. We can constrain the SFH with high level of precision from galaxies with resolved stellar populations, since we…
Modeling galaxy formation in a cosmological context presents one of the greatest challenges in astrophysics today, due to the vast range of scales and numerous physical processes involved. Here we review the current status of models that…
Stars are powerful sources for weakly interacting particles that are produced by nuclear or plasma processes in their hot interior. These fluxes can be used for direct measurements (e.g. solar or supernova neutrinos) or the back-reaction on…
The physics of neutron star crusts is vast, involving many different research fields, from nuclear and condensed matter physics to general relativity. This review summarizes the progress, which has been achieved over the last few years, in…
The centre of our Galaxy is one of the most studied and yet enigmatic places in the Universe. At a distance of about 8 kpc from our Sun, the Galactic centre (GC) is the ideal environment to study the extreme processes that take place in the…