Related papers: Water Formation During the Epoch of First Metal En…
The formation of the first stars out of metal-free gas appears to result in stars at least an order of magnitude more massive than in the present-day case. We here consider what controls the transition from a primordial to a modern initial…
We show that the winds identified with high-redshift low-mass galaxies may strongly affect the formation of stars in more massive galaxies that form later. With 3D realizations of a simple linear growth model we track gas shocking, metal…
In typical astrophysical environments, the abundance of heavy elements ranges from 0.001 to 2 times the solar concentration. Lower abundances have been seen in select stars in the Milky Way's halo and in two quasar absorption systems at…
We argue that extreme metal-poor stars show a high dispersion in metallicity, because their abundances are the outcome of very few supernova events. Abundance anomalies should appear because of the discrete range of progenitor masses. There…
Our knowledge of galactic chemical evolution is currently limited to observations of Milky Way stars and H II regions of nearby galaxies. Damped Lyman~$\alpha$ systems offer a new approach for tracking the evolution of normal galaxies from…
The first stars are predicted to have formed within 200 million years after the Big Bang, initiating the cosmic dawn. A true first star has not yet been discovered, although stars with tiny amounts of elements heavier than helium ('metals')…
In cold dark matter cosmological models, the first stars to form are believed to do so within small protogalaxies. We wish to understand how the evolution of these early protogalaxies changes once the gas forming them has been enriched with…
The first stars, known as Population III (PopIII), produced the first heavy elements, thereby enriching their surrounding pristine gas. Previous detections of metals in intergalactic gas clouds, however, find a heavy element enrichment…
The presence of elements heavier than helium ("metals") is of fundamental importance for a large number of astrophysical processes occurring in planet, star and galaxy formation; it also affects cosmic structure formation and evolution in…
We observe a sharp transition from a singular, high-mass mode of star formation, to a low-mass dominated mode, in numerical simulations, at a metallicity of 10^-3 Zsolar. We incorporate a new method for including the radiative cooling from…
In popular cold dark matter cosmological scenarios, stars may have first appeared in significant numbers around a redshift of 10 or so, as the gas within protogalactic halos with virial temperatures in excess of 20,000 K (corresponding to…
Observations of metal lines in $\lyal$ absorption systems of small H~I column density and their ubiquitous nature suggest that the intergalactic medium (IGM) was enriched to about $Z \sim 0.01 \> Z_{\odot}$ by a redshift $z \sim 3$. We…
The character of the first galaxies at redshifts z > 10 strongly depends on their level of pre-enrichment, which is in turn determined by the rate of primordial star formation prior to their assembly. In order for the first galaxies to…
The formation of supermassive stars has generally been studied under the assumption of rapid accretion of pristine metal-free gas. Recently it was found, however, that gas enriched to metallicities up to $Z \sim 10^{-3}$ Z$_{\odot}$ can…
We differentiate between the metal enrichment of the gas in virialized minihalos and that of the intergalactic medium at high redshift, pertinent to cosmological reionization, with the initial expectation that gas in the high density…
A galaxy's metallicity provides a record of star formation, gas accretion, and gas outflow, and is therefore one of the most informative measurements that can be made at high redshift. It is also one of the most difficult. I review methods…
Theoretical studies and current observations of the high-redshift intergalactic medium (IGM) indicate that at least two cosmic transitions occur by the time the universe reaches gas metallicities of about $10^{-3}$ of solar values. These…
We have measured the mass of metals in the molecular gas in 13 submillimetre galaxies at z~4 in which the gas, based on previous observations, lies in a cold rotating disk. We measured the metal masses using either the submillimetre line or…
Several planets have recently been discovered around old metal-poor stars, implying that these planets are also old, formed in the early Universe. The canonical theory suggests that the conditions for their formation could not have existed…
Scaling from the empirical metal yield as measured in clusters of galaxies, it is inferred that early in the evolution of the Galaxy the bulge stellar population has produced $\sim 10^9\msun$ of metals, at least 5 times more than the total…