Related papers: Exploring the Dawn of Galaxies
The fundamental paradox of the incompatibility of the observed large-scale uniformity of the Universe with the fact that the age of the Universe is finite is overcome by the introduction of an initial a period of superluminal expansion of…
Over the past few decades, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. I begin with a review of the observational evidence for the existence of dark matter: rotation curves of…
Evolution in the measured rest frame ultraviolet spectral slope and ultraviolet to optical flux ratios indicate a rapid evolution in the dust obscuration of galaxies during the first 3 billion years of cosmic time (z>4). This evolution…
The history of the Universe after its first second is now tested by high quality observations of light element abundances and temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. The epoch of the first second itself has not been…
To understand the evolution of galaxies, we need to know as accurately as possible how many galaxies were present in the Universe at different epochs. Galaxies in the young Universe have hitherto mainly been identified using their expected…
Deflection of light by gravity was predicted by General Relativity and observationaly confirmed in 1919. In the following decades various aspects of the gravitational lens effect were explored theoretically, among them the possibility of…
With the recent measurements of temperature and polarization anisotropies in the microwave background by WMAP, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology, with the cosmological parameters of a Standard Cosmological Model determined to…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
During the first 500 million years of cosmic history, the first stars and galaxies formed, seeding the Universe with heavy elements and eventually reionizing the intergalactic medium. Observations with JWST have uncovered a surprisingly…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for launch in 2014, is expected to revolutionize our understanding of the high-redshift Universe. Even so, many of the most interesting sources that may be hiding at redshifts z~10…
We provide a review of our current knowledge of galaxies throughout the first billion years of cosmic history. This field has undergone a transformation in the last two years following the launch of $\textit{JWST}$, and we aim to deliver an…
Independent lines of evidence suggest that the first stars, which ended the cosmic dark ages, came in pairs, rather than singly. This could change the prevailing view that the early Universe had a Swiss-cheese-like appearance.
The universe goes through several phase transitions during its formative stages. Cosmic reionization is the last of them, where ultraviolet and X-ray radiation escape from the first generations of galaxies heating and ionizing their…
In the first part of this paper we summarize the discovery and the early study of the gamma-ray bursts. The second part studies the spatial and sky distribution of the bursters. The brightness distribution is also studied. In the conclusion…
This is an updated version of my paper "An outline of radiatively-driven cosmology" (Kurucz 2000). Here the Big Bang universe is replaced by a finite cellular automaton universe with no expansion (Kurucz 2006). The Big Bang is replaced by…
The sky-averaged (global) 21-cm signal is a very promising probe of the Cosmic Dawn, when the first luminous sources were formed and started to shine in a substantially neutral intergalactic medium. I here report on the status and early…
We discuss the expected properties of the first stellar generations in the Universe. We find that it is possible to discern truly primordial populations from the next generation of stars by measuring the metallicity of high-z star forming…
This paper presents a necessarily incomplete review of the evolution of cosmology since the first Astro/Cosmo Moriond meeting in 1981. I trace the journey from the classical Big Bang model based on three pillars -- universe expansion,…
The intergalactic medium - the cosmic gas that fills the great spaces between the galaxies - is affected by processes ranging from quantum fluctuations in the very early universe to radiative emission from newly-formed stars. This gives the…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of the Universe -- spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos; and…