Related papers: Our astrochemical heritage
The knowledge of isotopic and elemental abundances of the pristine solar system material provides a fundamental test of galactic chemical evolution models, while the composition of the solar photosphere is a reference pattern to understand…
The elegance of inflationary cosmology and cosmological perturbation theory ends with the formation of the first stars and galaxies, the initial sources of light that launched the phenomenologically rich process of cosmic reionization. Here…
Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos - the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the Solar system), we now know of thousands,…
In expansion of our recent proposal (Physics, 2020, 2, 213-276) that the solar system's evolution occurred in two stages -- during the first stage, the gaseous giants formed (via disk instability), and, during the second stage (caused by an…
The late stages of stellar evolution from asymptotic giant branch stars to planetary nebulae are now known to be an active phase of molecular synthesis. Over 80 gas-phase molecules have been detected through rotational transitions in the…
The Sun provides a standard reference against which we compare the chemical abundances found anywhere else in the Universe. Nevertheless, there is not a unique 'solar' composition, since the chemical abundances found in the solar interior,…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
Rest-frame optical observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have uncovered a population of massive galaxies, exceeding $10^{10}$ solar masses, present less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The large stellar masses of…
Spectroscopic observations of distant cosmological sources continue to exhibit a surprising result; that the chemical abundance of the universe seems to be approximately solar for the observed sources at redshifts of 5, 6, and even 7, even…
In this chapter we describe chemistry of the early atmosphere of the Earth during and shortly after its formation where there is little if any geological record. We review the arguments for a secondary origin of the terrestrial atmosphere,…
A question central to understanding the origin of our solar system is: how do planets form in circumstellar disks around young stars? Because of the complex nature of the physical processes involved, multi-wavelength observations of large…
In this paper, we model the chemical evolution of a 0.25 M$_{\odot}$ protoplanetary disc surrounding a 1 M$_{\odot}$ star that undergoes fragmentation due to self-gravity. We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics including a radiative…
From studying the cosmic microwave background, we know our Universe started out very simple. It was by and large homogeneous and isotropic, with small fluctuations that can be described by linear perturbation theory. In stark contrast, the…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
Our galaxy is full with planets. We now know that planets and planetary systems are diverse and come with different sizes, masses and compositions, as well as various orbital architectures. Although there has been great progress in…
The huge variety of planetary systems discovered in recent decades likely depends on the early history of their formation. In this contribution we introduce the FAUST Large Program, which focuses specifically on the early history of…
The formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems of astrophysics. Within the broad context of hierachical structure formation, we have only a crude picture of how galaxies like our own came into existence. A…
Exoplanets are organized in a broad array of orbital configurations that reflect their formation along with billions of years of dynamical processing through gravitational interactions. This history is encoded in the angular momentum…
In this review we re-evaluate our observational and theoretical understanding of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks. We discuss how improved observational capabilities have enabled the detection of numerous molecules exposing an…
The discovery that the short-lived radionucleide iron-60 was present in the oldest meteorites suggests that the formation of the Earth closely followed the death of a massive star. I discuss three astrophysical origins: winds from an AGB…