Related papers: A Glimpse of the First Galaxies
Star forming galaxies represent a valuable tracer of cosmic history. Recent observational progress with Hubble Space Telescope has led to the discovery and study of the earliest-known galaxies corresponding to a period when the Universe was…
A number of years ago the estimates of astronomers and astrophysicists were that the earliest galaxies took about 2.5 to 3 billion years to form, that is, that they did not appear until 2.5 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Those…
Some few hundred million years after the big bang the Universe was illuminated by the first stars and galaxies thereby bringing an end to the cosmological dark ages. Since the installation of WFC3 on the Hubble Space Telescope our ability…
We review our current understanding of how the first galaxies formed at the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few 100 million years after the Big Bang. Modern large telescopes discovered galaxies at redshifts greater than seven, whereas…
Large telescopes have allowed astronomers to observe galaxies that formed as early as 850 million years after the Big Bang. We predict when the first star that astronomers can observe formed in the universe, accounting for the first time…
The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years…
One of the milestones in the cosmic history is the formation of the first luminous objects and Hydrogen reionization. The standard theory of cosmic structure formation predicts that the first generation of stars were born about a few…
A primeval galaxy represents the earliest stages of a galaxy's life and as such provides clues to the early history of the Universe and the evolution of stars and galaxies. Over the last 20 years astronomers have been engaged in the quest…
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
Until now, investigating the early stages of galaxy formation has been primarily the realm of theoretical modeling and computer simulations, which require many physical ingredients and are challenging to test observationally. However, the…
The universe would have been completely dark between the epoch of recombination and the development of the first non-linear structure. But at redshifts beyond 5 -- perhaps even beyond 20 -- stars formed within `subgalaxies' and created the…
The formation of the first stars and quasars marks the transformation of the universe from its smooth initial state to its clumpy current state. In popular cosmological models, the first sources of light began to form at redshift 30 and…
To understand the evolution of galaxies, we need to know as accurately as possible how many galaxies were present in the Universe at different epochs. Galaxies in the young Universe have hitherto mainly been identified using their expected…
I review recent progress and challenges in studies of the earliest galaxies, seen when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old. Can they be used as reliable tracers of the physics of cosmic reionization thereby complementing other,…
Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of…
The first dwarf galaxies, which constitute the building blocks of the collapsed objects we find today in the Universe, had formed hundreds of millions of years after the big bang. This pedagogical review describes the early growth of their…
The earliest generation of stars, far from being a mere novelty, transformed the universe from darkness to light. The first atoms to form after the Big Bang filled the universe with atomic hydrogen and a few light elements. As gravity…
Here, we ask a simple question, i.e. "at what cosmic time, at the earliest, did life first appear in the universe?" Given what we know about the universe today, there may be some partial answers to this question, but much will still have to…
Observing the first galaxies formed during the reionisation epoch, i.e. approximately within the first billion years after the Big Bang, remains one of the challenges of contemporary astrophysics. Several efforts are being undertaken to…
The spatial fluctuations of the extragalactic background light trace the total emission from all stars and galaxies in the Universe. A multi-wavelength study can be used to measure the integrated emission from first galaxies during…