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The abundance patterns of extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars provide us with important information on nucleosynthesis in supernovae (SNe) formed in a Pop III or EMP environment, and thus on the nature of the first stars in the Universe. We…
We review observable signatures of the first generation of stars and low-luminosity quasars, including the metal enrichment, radiation background, and dust opacity/emission that they produce. We compute the formation history of collapsed…
We investigate the impact of an early population of massive stars on their surroundings. Dissociation of molecular hydrogen by strong UV emission from such stars is expected to produce a global transition in the cooling mechanism of…
The origin of high-redshift quasars and their supermassive black hole engines is unclear. One promising solution is the collapse of a primordial supermassive star. Observational confirmation of this scenario may be challenging, but a…
The origin of calcium production in the first stars (Pop III stars), which formed out of the primordial matter of the Big Bang, and their fates, remain most fascinating mysteries in astrophysics. Advanced nuclear burning and supernovae were…
Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will enable observations of galaxies at redshifts z > 10 and hence allow to test our current understanding of structure formation at very early times. Previous work has shown that the very first…
Understanding the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies represents one of the most exciting frontiers in astronomy. Since the universe was filled with hydrogen atoms at early times, the most promising probe of the epoch of…
We calculate the contribution to the cosmic infrared background from very massive metal-free stars at high redshift. We explore two plausible star-formation models and two limiting cases for the reprocessing of the ionizing stellar…
The cosmic dark ages are the mysterious epoch during which the pristine gas began to condense and ultimately form the first stars. Although these beginnings have long been a topic of theoretical interest, technology has only recently…
The first stars likely formed from pristine clouds, marking a transformative epoch after the dark ages by initiating reionisation and synthesising the first heavy elements. Among these, low-mass Population III stars are of particular…
In the first two years of operation JWST has delivered key new insights into the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early Universe. By combining imaging with spectroscopy, we discovered and characterised the first generation of…
The nature of the first, so-called Population III (Pop III) stars has for long remained largely unconstrained. However, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finally opened new concrete prospects for their detection during the Epoch of…
The metal-poor stars in the Galactic halo are thought to show the imprints of the first (PopIII) stars, and thus provide a glance at the first episodes of star formation. In this work, we aim at understanding whether all very metal-poor…
Interactions between massive stars in binaries are thought to be responsible for much of the observed diversity of supernovae. As surveys probe rarer populations of events, we should expect to see supernovae arising from increasingly…
Population III (pop III) stars were born in halos characterised by a pristine gas composition. In such a halo, once the gas density reaches n$_{\mathrm{H}} \sim$ 1 cm$^{-3}$, molecular cooling leads to the collapse of the gas and the birth…
The nature of the first Pop III stars is still a mystery and the energy distribution of the first supernovae is completely unexplored. For the first time we account simultaneously for the unknown initial mass function (IMF), stellar mixing,…
In reionized regions of the Universe, gas can only collapse to form stars in dark matter (DM) haloes which grow to be sufficiently massive. If star formation is prevented in the minihalo progenitors of such DM haloes at redshifts z >~ 20,…
We study the observational consequences of several unknown properties of Population III (Pop III) stars using large-scale cosmological simulations that include a subgrid model to track the unresolved mixing of pollutants. Varying the value…
All measurements of cosmic star formation must assume an initial distribution of stellar masses -- the stellar initial mass function -- in order to extrapolate from the star-formation rate measured for typically rare, massive stars (> 8…