Related papers: Our astrochemical heritage
The chemical evolution of a star- and planet-forming system begins in the prestellar phase and proceeds across the subsequent evolutionary phases. The chemical trail from cores to protoplanetary disks to planetary embryos can be studied by…
The chemical composition of a protoplanetary disk is determined not only by in situ chemical processes during the disk phase, but also by the history of the gas and dust before it accreted from the natal envelope. In order to understand the…
The cosmic microwave background and the cosmic expansion can be interpreted as evidence that the Universe underwent an extremely hot and dense phase about 14 Gyr ago. The nucleosynthesis computations tell us that the Universe emerged from…
The Sun is thought to be formed within a star cluster. The coexistence of $^{26}{\rm Al}$-rich and $^{26}{\rm Al}$-poor calcium--aluminum-rich inclusions indicates that a direct injection of $^{26}{\rm Al}$-rich materials from a nearby…
Ancient, long-lived stars remain present in all components of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Born a few hundred million after the Big Bang and during a time that marked the very beginning of the chemical evolution, these stars display very…
Radioactive nuclei are the key to understanding the circumstances of the birth of our Sun because meteoritic analysis has proven that many of them were present at that time. Their origin, however, has been so far elusive. The ERC-CoG-2016…
For more than 140 years the chemical composition of our Sun has been considered typical of solar-type stars. Our highly differential elemental abundance analysis of unprecedented accuracy (~0.01 dex) of the Sun relative to solar twins,…
Since chemical abundances are inherited between generations of stars, we use them to trace the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. We present a robust methodology for creating a phylogenetic tree, a biological tool used for centuries to…
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,…
This chapter presents a (partial) review of the information we can derive on the early history of the Solar System from radioactive nuclei of very different half-life, which were recognized to have been present alive in pristine solids. In…
Models of planet formation are built on underlying physical processes. In order to make sense of the origin of the planets we must first understand the origin of their building blocks. This review comes in two parts. The first part presents…
The compositions of stars are a critical diagnostic tool for many topics in astronomy such as the evolution of our Galaxy, the formation of planets, and the uniqueness of the Sun. Previous spectroscopic measurements indicate a large…
We discuss a chemical evolution model with Z-dependent yields that reproduces the O/H, C/H, and C/O gradients of the Galactic disk and the chemical history of the solar vicinity. The model fits the H, He, C, and O abundances derived from…
We combine constraints on galaxy formation histories with planet formation models, yielding the Earth-like and giant planet formation histories of the Milky Way and the Universe as a whole. In the Hubble Volume (10^13 Mpc^3), we expect…
The formation of our Milky Way can be parsed qualitatively into different phases that resulted in its structurally different stellar populations: the halo and the disk components. Revealing a quantitative overall picture of the Galactic…
An outstanding question of astrobiology is the link between the chemical composition of planets, comets, and other solar system bodies and the molecules formed in the interstellar medium. Understanding the chemical and physical evolution of…
Theoretical physical-chemical models for the formation of planetary systems depend on data quality for the Sun's composition, that of stars in the solar neighbourhood, and of the estimated "pristine" compositions for stellar systems. The…
Based on early solar system abundances of short-lived radionuclides (SRs), such as $^{26}$Al (T$_{1/2} = 0.74$ Myr) and $^{60}$Fe (T$_{1/2} = 1.5$ Myr), it is often asserted that the Sun was born in a large stellar cluster, where a massive…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
The relative abundances of the radionuclides in the solar system at the time of its birth are crucial arbiters for competing hypotheses regarding the birth environment of the Sun. The presence of short-lived radionuclides, as evidenced by…