Related papers: Our astrochemical heritage
How do planetary systems, in general, and our own Solar System (SS), in particular, form? In conjunction, Astronomy and Isotope Cosmochemistry provide us with powerful tools to answer this age-old question. In this contribution, we review…
The basic processes of the formation of the first stars in the primordial Universe are outlined and the implications for cosmological structure formation discussed. By employing theoretical and numerical models of cosmic structure evolution…
Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planetary systems. The evolution of the star-disk system and the disk chemical composition determines the initial conditions for planet formation. Therefore a comprehensive understanding of the…
In this review we explore aspects of the field of astrobiology from an astronomical viewpoint. We therefore focus on the origin of life in the context of planetary formation, with additional emphasis on tracing the most abundant volatile…
My thesis work aims to study the inter-relation between various physical and chemical conditions in a wide range of astrophysical environments. Our studied regions range from the super-hot regions (i.e., nebular, photon-dominated, or…
Chemical evolution is essential in understanding the origins of life. We present a theory for the evolution of molecule masses and show that small molecules grow by random diffusion and large molecules by a preferential attachment process…
The ongoing discussion about the atomic chemical composition of the Sun is commented on. The main focus in this review is on the deviation of the solar composition from that of most other solar-type stars in that its ratio of volatiles…
In addition to long-lived radioactive nuclei like U and Th isotopes, which have been used to measure the age of the Galaxy, also radioactive nuclei with half-lives between 0.1 and 100 million years (short-lived radionuclides, SLRs) were…
Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…
Using 17 chemical elements as a proxy for stellar DNA, we present a full phylogenetic study of stars in the solar neighbourhood. This entails applying a clustering technique that is widely used in molecular biology to construct an…
Recent analysis of the decay products of short-lived radiounclides (SLRs) in meteorites, in particular the confirmation of the presence of live 60Fe in the early Solar System, provides unambiguous evidence that the Sun and Solar System…
Complex organics are now commonly found in meteorites, comets, asteroids, planetary satellites, and interplanetary dust particles. The chemical composition and possible origin of these organics are presented. Specifically, we discuss the…
The Capture Theory gives planet production through a tidal interaction between a condensed star and a diffuse protostar within a dense embedded cluster. Initial extensive and highly eccentric planetary orbits round-off and decay in a…
The nature of the first generation of stars in the Universe remains largely unknown. Observations imply the existence of massive primordial stars early in the history of the universe, and the standard theory for the growth of cosmic…
Low-mass protostars form from condensations inside molecular clouds when gravity overwhelms thermal and magnetic supporting forces. The first phases of the formation of a solar-type star are characterized by dramatic changes not only in the…
The study of the chemical evolution of gas and dust from pre-stellar dense cores to circumstellar disks around young stars forms an essential part of understanding star- and planet formation. Throughout the collapse- and protostellar…
By plotting empirical chemical element abundances on Earth relative to the Sun and normalized to silicon versus their first ionization potentials, we confirm the existence of a correlation reported earlier. To explain this, we develop a…
We discuss the main ingredients necessary to build models of chemical evolution of spiral galaxies and in particular the Milky Way galaxy. These ingredients include: the star formation rate, the initial mass function, the stellar yields and…
A long and thorough investigation of chemical abundances of planet-hosting stars that lasted for more than a decade has finally beared fruit. We explore a sample of 148 solar-like stars to search for a possible correlation between the…
In our grid of multiphase chemical evolution models (Moll\'a & D\'iaz, 2005), star formation in the disk occurs in two steps: first, molecular gas forms, and then stars are created by cloud-cloud collisions or interactions of massive stars…