Related papers: From Gas to Stars Over Cosmic Time
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…
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,…
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…
Modern cosmological simulations predict that the first generation of stars formed with a mass scale around 100 solar masses about 300-400 million years after the Big Bang. When the first stars reached the end of their lives, many of them…
In this review, I survey our current understanding of how the very first stars in the universe formed, with a focus on three main areas of interest: the formation of the first protogalaxies and the cooling of gas within them, the nature and…
A number of years ago the estimates of astronomers and astrophysicists were that the earliest galaxies took about 2.5 to 3 billion years to form, that is, that they did not appear until 2.5 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Those…
Stars in star clusters are thought to form in a single burst from a common progenitor cloud of molecular gas. However, massive, old globular clusters -- with ages greater than 10 billion years and masses of several hundred thousand solar…
First-generation (Population III) stars in the universe play an important role inearly enrichment of heavy elements in galaxies and intergalactic medium and thus affect the history of galaxies. The physical and chemical properties of…
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…
We review the evolution of the cosmic average molecular gas density to large look-back times, using observations of rotational transitions of CO. Molecular gas is the fuel for star formation in galaxies. Deep searches for CO emission from…
Quantification of the Galaxy's star formation history involves both the duration and the rate of formation, with these parameters being known with different precision for different populations. The early rate of star formation is knowable…
The deepest multi-wavelength surveys now provide measurements of star formation in galaxies out to z>1, and allow to reconstruct its history for large parts of the galaxy population. I review recent studies, which have consistently revealed…
I discuss recent theoretical work on the formation and evolution of galaxies paying particular attention to the ability of current models to make detailed comparisons with observations of the galaxy population both nearby and at high…
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…
Observations suggest that star formation occurs in only one or two crossing times for a range of scales spanning a factor of 1000. These observations include (1) measurements of embedded cluster ages in comparison with the cloud core…
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 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…
The earliest generation of stars, far from being a mere novelty, transformed the universe from darkness to light. The first atoms to form after the Big Bang filled the universe with atomic hydrogen and a few light elements. As gravity…
Determination of the star formation rate can be done using mid-IR photometry or Balmer line luminosity after a proper correction for extinction effects. Both methods show convergent results while those based on UV or on [OII]3727…
The interstellar medium of galaxies is composed of multiple phases, including molecular, atomic, and ionized gas, as well as dust. Stars are formed within this medium from cold molecular gas clouds, which collapse due to their gravitational…