Related papers: A Glimpse of the First Galaxies
A convergence of ideas, observations and technology have led to the greatest period of cosmological discovery yet. Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of our Universe. We are now challenged to make sense of what…
The current understanding of galaxy formation is that it proceeds in a 'bottom up' way, with the formation of small clumps of gas and stars that merge hierarchically until giant galaxies are built up. The baryonic gas loses the thermal…
In popular cosmological scenarios, some time beyond a redshift of 10, stars within protogalaxies created the first heavy elements; these systems, together perhaps with an early population of quasars, generated the ultraviolet radiation and…
Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the universe, and they can be studied in detail up to the highest known redshift. Assuming that the gas associated with quasars is closely related to the interstellar medium of the host galaxy,…
The first generation of stars were born a few hundred million years after the big bang. These stars synthesized elements heavier than H and He, that are later expelled into the interstellar medium, initiating the rise of metals. Within this…
Observational evidence has been mounting over the past decade that at least some luminous (~2 L*) galaxies have formed nearly all of their stars within a short period of time only 1-2x10^9 years after the Big Bang. These are examples of the…
It is thought that the first generations of massive stars in the Universe were an important, and quite possibly dominant, source of the ultra-violet radiation that reionized the hydrogen gas in the intergalactic medium (IGM); a state in…
The morphologies of disk galaxies begin to deviate systematically from those of nearby galaxies at surprisingly low redshifts, possibly as low as z=0.3. This corresponds to a time ~3.5 Gyr in the past, which is only one quarter of the…
These lectures summarize our basic understanding of the emergence of cosmic structures, the epoch of first light, the survival of early substructure in present-day galaxy halos.
Current observations are about to open up a direct window into the final frontier of cosmology: the first billion years in cosmic history when the first stars and galaxies formed. Even before the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, it…
I review some recent progress made in our understanding of galaxy evolution and the cosmic history of star formation. The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) imaging survey has achieved the sensitivity to capture the bulk of the extragalactic…
Early-type galaxies, considered as large bulges, have been found to have had a much-more-than-boring star formation history in recent years by the UV satellite GALEX. The most massive bulges, brightest cluster galaxies, appear to be…
The first galaxies in the Universe are the building blocks of all observed galaxies. We present scaling relations for galaxies forming at redshifts $z \ge 15$ when reionization is just beginning. We utilize the ``Rarepeak' cosmological…
We determine the age of 1,104 early-type galaxies in eight rich clusters ($z = 0.0046$ to $0.175$) using a new continuum color technique. We find that galaxies in clusters divide into two populations, an old population with a mean age…
We survey the early history of the discovery of quark gluon plasma and the early history of the Universe, beginning with the present day and reaching deep into QGP and almost beyond. We introduce cosmological Universe dynamics and connect…
Our universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot and dense singular point, in a process known as the Big Bang. The hot and dense matter which dominated the system within a few microseconds of its birth was in the…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
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…
Current theory and measurements establish the age of the universe as ca. 13.8 billion years. For the first several hundred million years of its existence, it was a dark, opaque void. After that, the hydrogen atoms comprising most of the…
Searches for very-high-redshift galaxies over the past decade have yielded a large sample of more than 6,000 galaxies existing just 900-2,000 million years (Myr) after the Big Bang (redshifts 6 > z > 3; ref. 1). The Hubble Ultra Deep Field…