Related papers: The New Frontier: Galactic-Scale Star Formation
Recent observational and theoretical work suggests that the formation of the Galactic stellar halo involved both dissipative processes and the accretion of subfragments. With present data, the fraction of the halo for which an accretion…
The exploitation of the power and the spatial resolution of HST and new generation ground-based telescopes allows to measure with good precision the individual stars of galaxies in and beyond the Local Group. This leads to very successful…
I review progress in understanding the evolution of normal field and cluster galaxies through the combination of HST imaging and ground-based spectroscopy. These data suggest that the bulk of the star formation producing the present-day…
Star formation lies at the center of a web of processes that drive cosmic evolution: generation of radiant energy, synthesis of elements, formation of planets, and development of life. Decades of observations have yielded a variety of…
Galaxy haloes contain fundamental clues about the galaxy formation and evolution process: hierarchical cosmological models predict haloes to be ubiquitous, and to be (at least in part) the product of past merger and/or accretion events. The…
Massive stars like company. Here, we provide a brief overview of progresses made over the last 5 years by a number of medium and large surveys. These results provide new insights on the observed and intrinsic multiplicity properties of main…
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…
Understanding the formation of the first stars and galaxies is a key problem in modern cosmology. In these lecture notes, we will derive some of the basic physical principles underlying this emerging field. We will consider the basic…
We propose to the community a comprehensive UV/optical/NIR imaging survey of Galactic star formation regions to probe all aspects of the star formation process. The primary goal of such a study is to understand the evolution of…
The origin of the galaxies represents an important focus of current cosmological research, both observational and theoretical. Its resolution involves a comprehensive understanding of star formation, galaxy dynamics, the cosmology of the…
We compute the attenuation of gamma-rays from remote quasars due to interactions with ambient low-energy photons produced by stars in galaxies and show that the next-generation gamma ray telescopes can probe the cosmic star formation rate…
Observations at long wavelengths, in the wide interval from a few to 1000 micron, are essential to study diffuse media in galaxies, including all kinds of atomic, ionic and molecular gases and dust grains. Hence they are particularly suited…
The star formation history of galaxies is a complex process usually considered to be stochastic in nature, for which we can only give average descriptions such as the color-density relation. In this work we follow star-forming gas particles…
The star formation history derived from ultraviolet and H$\alpha$ data, without correction for dust extinction, on the one hand, and from far infrared and submillimetre data, on the other, is investigated. The latter estimates are found to…
While ALMA and JWST are revolutionizing our view of star and planet formation with their unprecedented sensitivity and resolution at submillimeter and near-IR wavelengths, many outstanding questions can only be answered with observations in…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
Star formation history shows a gradual decline since the last 8-9 Gyr (z=1). The bulk of present-day stellar mass and metal content was formed at redshifts lower than 2-3, which is consistent with a hierarchical scenario of galaxy…
The late evolutionary stages of stellar evolution are a key ingredient for our understanding in many fields of astrophysics, including stellar evolution and the enrichment of the interstellar medium (ISM) via stellar yields. Already the…
In the past decade, our understanding of how stars and galaxies formed during the first 5 billion years after the Big Bang has been revolutionized by observations that leverage gravitational lensing by intervening masses, which act as…
This talk investigates the formation of early-type galaxies from a deliberately observational view point. I begin by reviewing the conclusions that can be reached by comparing the detailed properties of galaxies in present-day clusters,…