Related papers: Exploring the Dawn of Galaxies
Understanding the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies represents one of the most exciting frontiers in astronomy. Since the universe was filled with hydrogen atoms at early times, the most promising probe of the epoch of…
Existing data sets include an image of the Universe when it was 0.4 million years old (in the form of the cosmic microwave background), as well as images of individual galaxies when the Universe was older than a billion years. But there is…
The next generation of instruments designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will provide a historic opportunity to open the gravitational wave window to the primordial Universe. Through high sensitivity…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…
How and when did galaxies form and assemble their stars and stellar mass? The answer to these questions, so crucial to astrophysics and cosmology, requires the full reconstruction of the so called cosmic star formation rate density (SFRD),…
An introductory account is given of the understanding of the structure of the universe. At present the most plausible theory of the origin of the universe is that it formed from the explosion of an extremely hot and dense fireball several…
Hubble's announcement of the magnitude-redshift relation \cite{Hub29} brought about a major change in our understanding of the Universe. After tracing the pre-history of Hubble's work, and the hiatus in our understanding which his…
One of the greatest achievements of twentieth century physics is the discovery of a very close link between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This follows from the two basic principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, the uncertainty…
Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of…
The Universe is the grandest conceivable scale on which the human mind can strive to understand nature. The amazing aspect of cosmology, the branch of science that attempts to understand the origin and evolution of the Universe, is that it…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…
We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…
One of the most spectacular scientific breakthroughs in past decades was using measurements of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to test precisely our understanding of the history and composition of the Universe.…
Evolution needs long times and large numbers of samples or species. Our finely tuned physics can therefore not have evolved during the fast changes of a single Big-Bang universe, but the cosmological scales for time and for the number of…
The transition between the nearly smooth initial state of the Universe and its clumpy state today occurred during the epoch when the first stars and low-luminosity quasars formed. For Cold Dark Matter cosmologies, the radiation produced by…
The development of primordial inhomogeneities into the non-linear regime and the formation of the first astrophysical objects within dark matter halos mark the transition from a simple, neutral, cooling universe -- described by just a few…
Since more than a century we investigate cosmic particles coming from the Universe with the aim of understanding their nature, their origin and how they are accelerated. So far, cosmic rays have provided many impressive results, giving…
Imaging the Universe during the first hundreds of millions of years remains one of the exciting challenges facing modern cosmology. Observations of the redshifted 21 cm line of atomic hydrogen offer the potential of opening a new window…
The recently discovered Submillimeter Extragalactic Background (submm EB) has opened new perspectives on our understanding of galaxy evolution. We detail in this paper one of the major cosmological consequences of this discovery, the submm…
According to the current understanding of cosmic structure formation, the precursors of the most massive structures in the Universe began to form shortly after the Big Bang, in regions corresponding to the largest fluctuations in the cosmic…