Related papers: Reconstructing the cosmic evolution of the chemica…
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Elements heavier than helium are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
Understanding where elements were formed has been a key goal in astrophysics for nearly a century, with answers involving cosmology, stellar burning, and cosmic explosions. Since 1957, the origin of the heaviest elements (formed via 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…
The oldest stars in the universe retain to a great extent detailed information on the chemical composition of the interstellar medium at the time of their birth. Hence the earliest phases of Galactic chemical evolution and nucleosynthesis…
Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, collectively termed metals, were created inside stars and dispersed through space at the final stages of stellar evolution. The relative amounts of different isotopes (variants of the same element…
Chemical evolution of galaxies brings together ideas on stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis with theories of galaxy formation, star formation and galaxy evolution, with all their associated uncertainties. In a new perspective brought…
The origins of the elements and isotopes of cosmic material is a critical aspect of understanding the evolution of the universe. Nucleosynthesis typically requires physical conditions of high temperatures and densities. These are found in…
The study of the long-dead early generations of massive stars is crucial in order to obtain a complete picture of the chemical evolution of the Universe, hence the origin of the elements. The nature of these stars can be inferred indirectly…
The history of life on Earth and in other potential life-bearing planetary platforms is deeply linked to the history of the universe. Since life as we know it relies on chemical elements forged in dying heavy stars, the universe needs to be…
The nucleosynthesis in the first massive stars may be constrained by observing the surface composition of long-lived very iron-poor stars born around 10 billion years ago from material enriched by their ejecta. Many interesting clues on…
The first generation of stars was formed from primordial gas. Numerical simulations suggest that the first stars were predominantly very massive, with typical masses M > 100 Mo. These stars were responsible for the reionization of the…
Our Sun and planetary system were born about 4.5 billion years ago. How did this happen and what is our heritage from these early times? This review tries to address these questions from an astrochemical point of view. On the one hand, we…
In this lecture I will introduce the concept of galactic chemical evolution, namely the study of how and where the chemical elements formed and how they were distributed in the stars and gas in galaxies. The main ingredients to build models…
Stellar chemical element ratios have well-defined systematic trends as a function of abundance, with an excellent correlation of these trends with stellar populations defined kinematically. This is remarkable, and has significant…
The chemistry of the early Universe is a fascinating field of study. Even in the absence of any elements heavier than lithium, a surprising degree of chemical complexity proves to be possible, giving the topic considerable interest in its…
We provide new nucleosynthesis yields depending on metallicity and energy (i.e., (normal supernovae and hypernovae), and show the evolution of heavy element abundances from C to Zn in the solar neighborhood. We then show the chemodynamical…
The chemical evolution of the Universe is governed by the chemical yields from stars, which in turn is determined primarily by the initial stellar mass. Even stars as low as 0.9Msun can, at low metallicity, contribute to the chemical…
The interstellar medium of low-metallicity systems undergoing star formation will show chemical abundance inhomogeneities due to supernova events enriching the medium on a local scale. If the star formation time-scale is shorter than the…
The chemically most primitive stars provide constraints on the nature of the first stellar objects that formed in the Universe; elements other than hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium within these objects were generated by…
The history of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy is found in the spatial distribution, kinematics, age and chemical abundance distributions of long-lived stars. From this fossil record one can in principle extract the star…