Related papers: Exploring the Dawn of Galaxies
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 Hubble Space Telescope (HST), in its thirteen years of operation, has allowed us to observe properties of the universe humans have been able, until very recently, to probe only with their thoughts. This review presents a brief summary…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…
A convergence of ideas, observations and technology have led to the greatest period of cosmological discovery yet. Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of our Universe. We are now challenged to make sense of what…
Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco 4 meter telescope not only has the focal plane size the 4 meters were built for, but also has excellent near infrared response. A DECam Deep Fields program is outlined, which can reach M* galaxies at…
One of the next decade's most exciting prospects is to explore the cosmic "dark ages," during which the first stars in the Universe formed, with the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. At z>6, this light redshifts into the low-frequency radio…
How did the universe evolve? The fine angular scale (l>1000) temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB are a Rosetta stone for understanding the evolution of the universe. Through detailed measurements one may address everything…
The first stars are believed to have formed a few hundred million years after the big bang in so-called dark matter minihalos with masses ~10^6 M_sun. Their radiation lit up the Universe for the first time, and the supernova explosions that…
The first stars ended the cosmic Dark Ages and created the first heavy elements necessary for the formation of planets and life. The properties of these stars remain uncertain, and it may be decades before individual Pop III stars are…
The discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson led to the establishment of the hot big-bang cosmological model some ten years later. Discoveries made in 1998 may ultimately have as profound an effect on…
Current observations are about to open up a direct window into the final frontier of cosmology: the first billion years in cosmic history when the first stars and galaxies formed. Even before the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, it…
In the past decade, our understanding of how stars and galaxies formed during the first 5 billion years after the Big Bang has been revolutionized by observations that leverage gravitational lensing by intervening masses, which act as…
The Cosmic Dark Ages mark a pivotal era of the universe's evolution, transitioning from a neutral, opaque medium to the emergence of the first stars and galaxies that initiated cosmic reionization. This study examines the thermodynamics of…
For millennia, humanity has relied exclusively on light$\unicode{x2014}$initially visible light and, later, broader and broader portions of the electromagnetic spectrum$\unicode{x2014}$to observe the universe. In the past decade, a…
A primeval galaxy represents the earliest stages of a galaxy's life and as such provides clues to the early history of the Universe and the evolution of stars and galaxies. Over the last 20 years astronomers have been engaged in the quest…
The past decade began with the first light of ALMA and will end at the start of the new era of hyperdimensional astrophysics. Our community-wide movement toward highly multiwavelength and multidimensional datasets has enabled immense…
Research over the past 25 years has led to the view that the rich tapestry of present-day cosmic structure arose during the first instants of creation, where weak ripples were imposed on the otherwise uniform and rapidly expanding…
The formation of the first stars and quasars marks the transition between the smooth initial state and the clumpy current state of the Universe. In popular CDM cosmologies, the first sources of light started to form at a redshift z=30 and…