Related papers: Massive Stars: Key to Solving the Cosmic Puzzle
If we are to develop a comprehensive and predictive theory of galaxy formation and evolution, it is essential that we obtain an accurate assessment of how and when galaxies assemble their stellar populations, and how this assembly varies…
The envelopes and disks that surround protostars reflect the initial conditions of star and planet formation and govern the assembly of stellar masses. Characterizing these structures requires observations that span the near-infrared to…
Imaging the bright maser emission produced by several molecular species at centimeter wavelengths is an essential tool for understanding the process of massive star formation because it provides a way to probe the kinematics of dense…
The formation of stars, particularly the high-mass star formation, poses several still open questions. Nowadays, thanks to the most modern telescopes and instruments, we are able to observe and analyse many physical and chemical processes…
The discovery of gravitationally lensed stellar clusters at high redshift with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed extremely compact, massive star-forming systems in galaxies at $z > 6$, providing a new window into early…
According to the current understanding of cosmic structure formation, the precursors of the most massive structures in the Universe began to form shortly after the Big Bang, in regions corresponding to the largest fluctuations in the cosmic…
How and when did the first generation of stars form at the end of the cosmic dark ages? Quite generically, within variants of the cold dark matter model of cosmological structure formation, the first sources of light are expected to form in…
From the time the first stars formed over 13 billion years ago to the present, star formation has had an unexpectedly dynamic history. At first, the star formation rate density increased dramatically, reaching a peak 10 billion years ago…
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 fundamental quest of modern astronomy is to locate the earliest galaxies and study how they influenced the intergalactic medium a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The abundance of star-forming galaxies is known to decline…
Massive stars (with mass m_* > 8 solar masses) are fundamental to the evolution of galaxies, because they produce heavy elements, inject energy into the interstellar medium, and possibly regulate the star formation rate. The individual star…
How is the universe organized on large scales? How did this structure evolve from the unknown initial conditions to the present time? The answers to these questions will shed light on the cosmology we live in, the amount, composition and…
The first stars in the Universe are predicted to have been much more massive than the Sun. Gravitational condensation accompanied by cooling of the primordial gas due to molecular hydrogen, yields a minimum fragmentation scale of a few…
A remarkable span of frontier astrophysics, from gravitational-wave archaeology to the origin of the elements to interpreting snapshots of the earliest galaxies, depends sensitively on our understanding of massive star formation and…
The first generation of stars was formed from primordial gas. Numerical simulations suggest that the first stars were predominantly very massive, with typical masses M > 100 Mo. These stars were responsible for the reionization of the…
There has been remarkable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies of galaxy formation and evolution. Largely due to a combination of deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging, Keck spectroscopy, and COBE far-IR background…
We examine stellar population gradients in ~100 massive early type galaxies spanning 180 < sigma* < 370 km/s and M_K of -22.5 to -26.5 mag, observed as part of the MASSIVE survey (Ma et al. 2014). Using integral-field spectroscopy from the…
We consider current state of star formation theory and requirements to observations in millimeter and submillimeter ranges which are necessary for resolution of the most actual problems of the physics of star formation. Two key features of…
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…
We discuss the expected properties of the first stellar generations in the Universe. We find that it is possible to discern truly primordial populations from the next generation of stars by measuring the metallicity of high-z star forming…