Related papers: Segue 1 - A Compressed Star Formation History Befo…
The advent of m class telescopes has allowed the detailed spectroscopic study of sizeable numbers of extremely metal-poor Galactic stars which are the witnesses of the formation of the early Galaxy. Their chemical composition displays some…
Star forming dwarf galaxies (SFDGs) have a high gas content and low metallicities, reminiscent of the basic entities in hierarchical galaxy formation scenarios. In the young universe they probably also played a major role in the cosmic…
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…
We derive and analyse the star formation histories of 393 intermediate-redshift (0.1 $\leq$ z $\leq$ 0.9) galaxies with stellar masses between $\sim$10$^{8}$ - 10$^{12}$ M$_{\odot}$. We probe a cosmic time of approximately 6 Gyr and a range…
We investigate the nature of the newly discovered Ultra Faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies (UF dSphs) in a general cosmological context simultaneously accounting for various ``classical`` dSphs and Milky Way properties including their…
We present tentative evidence for the existence of a dissolved star cluster at [Fe/H]=-2.7 in the Sextans dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We use the technique of chemical tagging to identify stars that are highly clustered in a multi-dimensional…
We report on the chemical abundances derived from high-dispersion spectra of 14 red giant stars in the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal (Sgr dSph) galaxy. The stars span a wide range of metallicities, -1.6 < [Fe/H] < -0.1 dex, and exhibit very…
We demonstrate how the least luminous galaxies in the Universe, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, are sensitive to their dynamical mass at the time of cosmic reionization. We select a low-mass ($\sim \text{1.5} \times 10^{9} \, \text{M}_{\odot}$)…
We present the first detailed chemical abundances for seven GD-1 stream stars from Subaru/HDS spectroscopy. Atmospheric parameters were derived via color calibrations ($T\rm_{eff}$) and iterative spectroscopic analysis. LTE abundances for…
The first stars were born from chemically pristine gas. They were likely massive, and thus they rapidly exploded as supernovae, enriching the surrounding gas with the first heavy elements. In the Local Group, the chemical signatures of the…
A possible relation between the high dispersion in metallicity of metal-poor halo stars and the minor merger processes in the history of the Galaxy is presented. The foreign populations of stars in the satellites through minor merger…
The first stars were likely more massive than those forming today and thus rapidly evolved, exploding as supernovae and enriching the surrounding gas with their chemical products. In the Local Group, the chemical signature of the first…
We use cosmological, chemo-dynamical, smoothed particle hydrodynamical simulations of Milky-Way-analogue galaxies to find the expected present-day distributions of both metal-free stars that formed from primordial gas and the oldest star…
The star formation and metal enrichment histories of galaxies - at any epoch - constitute one of the key properties of galaxies, and their measurement is a core aim of observational extragalactic astronomy. The lack of deep rest-frame…
The emergence of the first sources of light at redshifts of z ~ 10-30 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the Universe to one of increasing complexity. We review recent progress in our understanding of the formation of…
To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark…
We report a detailed abundance analysis for HE0107-5240, a halo giant with [Fe/H]_NLTE=-5.3. This star was discovered in the course of follow-up medium-resolution spectroscopy of extremely metal-poor candidates selected from the digitized…
Despite the interest in Dark Matter (DM) searches is currently more focused on underground experiments, a signature of DM annihilation/decay in gamma-rays from space would constitute a smoking gun for its identification. In this…
It has been proposed theoretically that the first generation of stars in the Universe (population III) would be as massive as 100 solar masses (100Mo), because of inefficient cooling of the precursor gas clouds. Recently, the most…
We present a quantitative analysis of the star formation history (SFH) of the Local Group dSph galaxy Leo I, from the information in its HST [(V-I),I] color-magnitude diagram (CMD). The method we use is based in comparing, via synthetic…