Related papers: A smoother end to the dark ages
Over the past few decades, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. I begin with a review of the observational evidence for the existence of dark matter: rotation curves of…
At redshift z = 2, when the Universe was just three billion years old, half of the most massive galaxies were extremely compact and had already exhausted their fuel for star formation(1-4). It is believed that they were formed in intense…
The first stars to form in the history of the universe may have been powered by dark matter annihilation rather than by fusion. This new phase of stellar evolution may have lasted millions to billions of years. These dark stars can grow to…
The first stars ended the cosmic Dark Ages and created the first heavy elements necessary for the formation of planets and life. The properties of these stars remain uncertain, and it may be decades before individual Pop III stars are…
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…
Astrophysical observations provide a picture of the universe as a 4-dim homogeneous and isotropic flat space-time dominated by an unknown form of dark energy. To achieve such a cosmology one has to consider in the early universe an…
One signature of an expanding universe is the time-variation of the cosmological abundances of its different components. For example, a radiation-dominated universe inevitably gives way to a matter-dominated universe, and critical moments…
Modern cosmological simulations predict that the first generation of stars formed with a mass scale around 100 solar masses about 300-400 million years after the Big Bang. When the first stars reached the end of their lives, many of them…
Dark Stars are the very first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the universe: the first stars to form (typically at redshifts $z \sim 10-50$) are powered by heating from dark matter (DM) annihilation instead of fusion (if the DM…
We have proposed that the first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the Universe may be Dark Stars (DS), powered by dark matter heating rather than by nuclear fusion, and in this paper we examine the history of these DS. The power…
I review recent progress in understanding the formation of the first stars and quasars. The initial conditions for their emergence are given by the now firmly established model of cosmological structure formation. Numerical simulations of…
The "dark age" of the Universe is generally pointed out as the period between the recombination epoch and the horizon of current observations (z=5-6). The arrow of time in the cosmic history describes the progression from simplicity to…
In currently popular cosmological scenarios -- all variants of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmogony -- some time beyond a redshift of 15, stars within the numerous small halos that condense with virial temperatures ~1e4 K created the first…
It is thought that the Universe went through an early period known as the Dark Ages, during which primeval density fluctuations grew to form the first luminous objects, marking the beginning of Cosmic Dawn around 100 million years after the…
Modelling of Extreme Scattering Events suggests that the Galaxy's dark matter is an undetected population of cold, AU-sized, planetary-mass gas clouds. None of the direct observational constraints on this picture -- thermal/non-thermal…
Dark stars powered by dark matter annihilation have been proposed as the first luminous sources in the universe. These stars are believed to form in the central dark matter cusp of low-mass minihalos. Recent calculations indicate stellar…
We suggest the possibility of creation in the early Universe of stable domains of radius a few kilometers wide, formed by coherently excited states of $\pi$-mesons. Such domains appear dark to an external observer, since the decay rate of…
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…
Several emerging links between high-redshift observational cosmology and the Galactic fossil evidence found in the kinematics, metallicities and ages of Milky Way stars are discussed. In a flat Cold Dark Matter model with $\Omega\simeq 0.3$…
Mirror matter is a stable self-collisional dark matter candidate. If exact mirror parity is a conserved symmetry of nature, there could exist a parallel hidden (mirror) sector of the Universe which has the same kind of particles and the…