Related papers: Beasts in Lambda-CDM Zoo
One of the key goals in observational cosmology over the next few years will be to establish the redshift distribution of the recently-discovered sub-mm source population. In this brief review I discuss and summarize the redshift…
The origin of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) remains a long-standing problem in astrophysics. Recent JWST observations reveal an unexpectedly abundant population of overmassive black holes at z>4-6, where the BH masses lie far above local…
The lack of detected intermediate mass black holes poses a gap in our understanding of the growth and evolution of the most exotic of astrophysical objects. Here we investigate the possibility of low-luminosity relativistic jets launched by…
Within just the last few years, we have advanced from knowing only a few galaxies at z>2 to having redshifts for nearly 1000 z~2-5 objects. The majority of this sample has been detected through the photometric ``drop-out'' technique used so…
The high-redshift (z>2) galaxies discovered over the last few years with the Lyman-break technique represent, in number density, a major fraction of the galaxies known in the Local Universe. Thus, understanding the properties and the nature…
Deep surveys in many wavebands have shown that the rate at which stars were forming was at least a factor of 10 higher at z > 1 than today. Heavy elements (metals) are produced by stars, and the star formation history deduced by these…
The $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model successfully reproduces many aspects of the galaxy and structure formation of the universe. However, the growth of large-scale structures (LSSs) in the early universe is not well tested yet with…
Theory and observations reveal fatal flaws in the standard LambdaCDM model. The cold dark matter hierarchical clustering paradigm predicts a gradual bottom-up growth of gravitational structures assuming linear, collisionless, ideal flows…
Early JWST observations have revealed the ubiquitous presence in the early Universe, up to z about 16, of extreme baryon concentrations, namely forming globular clusters, extremely dense galaxies that may or may not be UV bright, and…
The emergence of the first black holes during the first billion years of cosmic history marks a key event in cosmology. Their formation is part of the overall process of ending the cosmic dark ages, when the first stars appeared in low-mass…
The existence of supermassive black holes as early as z ~ 7 is one of the great unsolved problems in cosmological structure formation. One leading theory argues that they are born during catastrophic baryon collapse in z ~ 15 protogalaxies…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made startling discoveries regarding the early universe. It has revealed galaxies as soon as 300 million years after the Big Bang, challenging current galaxy formation models. Additionally, it has…
Element abundances in high-redshift quasar absorbers offer excellent probes of the chemical enrichment of distant galaxies, and can constrain models for population III and early population II stars. Recent observations indicate that the…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the James Webb Space Telescope are transforming our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe. By combining their capabilities, these observatories provide…
Could there be intermediate mass black holes in essentially all old dwarf galaxies? I argue that current observations of Active Galactic Nuclei in dwarfs allow such a radical hypothesis which provides early feedback and potentially provides…
We describe observations in the nearby universe (<100 Mpc) with a 10-m or larger space-based telescope having imaging and spectral capabilities in the range 912-9000 \AA that would enable advances in the fields of massive stars, young…
By implementing a model of primordial dust emission, we predict dust-continuum fluxes for massive galaxy sources similar to those recently detected by JWST at $z \gtrsim 7$. Current upper flux limits, obtained with ALMA for some of these…
The last ten years have opened up a new parameter space in time-domain astronomy with the discovery of transients defying our understanding of how stars explode. These extremes of the transient paradigm represent the brightest - called…
In this manuscript, we investigate the constraints on dynamical vacuum models within the framework of $\Lambda(t)$CDM cosmology by assuming a parameterization of the vacuum energy density as $\rho_{\Lambda}(t)=\rho_{\Lambda 0} \left[1 +…
The first generation of stars in the Universe is yet to be observed. There are two leading theories for those objects that mark the beginning of the cosmic dawn: hydrogen burning Population~III stars and Dark Stars, made of hydrogen and…