Related papers: Combined Nucleosynthetic Yields of Multiple First …
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…
Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These…
Wide gravitationally bound pairs of stars can be formed from adjacent prestellar cores that happen to move slowly enough relative to each other. These binaries are remnants of the primordial clustering. It is shown that the expected…
The star formation history of nearby early-type galaxies is investigated via numerical modelling. Idealized hydrodynamical N-body simulations with a star formation prescription are used to study the minor merger process between a giant…
The very first stars likely formed from metal-free, molecular hydrogen-cooled gas at the centers of dark matter minihalos. Prior to nuclear fusion, these stars may have been supported by dark matter heating from annihilations in the star,…
The most metal-poor stars found in the Galaxy and in nearby galaxies are witnesses of the early evolution of the Universe. In a general picture in which we expect the metallicity to increase monotonically with time, as a result of the metal…
The external pollution of the first stars in the Galaxy is investigated. The first stars were born in clouds composed of the pristine gas without heavy elements. These stars accreted gas polluted with heavy elements while they still…
We simulate the formation of a metal-poor (10^-2 Zsun) stellar cluster in one of the first galaxies to form in the early Universe, specifically a high-redshift atomic cooling halo (z~14). This is the first calculation that resolves the…
We present a model for the formation of massive ($M > 10 M_\odot$) stars through accretion-induced collisions in the cores of embedded dense stellar clusters. This model circumvents the problem of accreting onto a star whose luminosity is…
The empirical laws of star formation suggest that galactic-scale gravity is involved, but they do not identify the actual triggering mechanisms for clusters in the final stages. Many other triggering processes satisfy the empirical laws…
We present a simulation of the formation of the earliest Population II stars, starting from cosmological initial conditions and ending when metals created in the first supernovae are incorporated into a collapsing gas-cloud. This occurs…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
A small set of chemically old stars that appear young by their independently derived masses has been detected. These are so-called $\alpha$-rich young stars. For a sample of 51 red-giant stars, for which spectra are available from…
The young star clusters we observe today are the building blocks of a new generation of stars and planets in our Galaxy and beyond. Despite their fundamental role we still lack knowledge about the conditions under which star clusters form…
Stars form from the gravitational collapse of dense molecular cloud cores. In the protostellar phase, mass accretes from the core onto a protostar, likely through an accretion disk, and it is during this phase that the initial masses of…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
I describe the current state of our knowledge of the mapping between the initial masses of stars and the compact objects -- particularly neutron stars and black holes -- that they produce. Most of that knowledge is theoretical in nature,…
We here focus on the behavior of supernovae that technically explode in 1D (spherical symmetry). When simulated in 3D, however, the outcomes of representative progenitors of this class are quite different in almost all relevant quantities.…
We use a spherical hydrodynamics code to show that in cold dark matter cosmologies, the first stars form at z=50 through the direct collapse of gas in low-mass systems (approx 10^4 solar masses). Photons from the first stars easily…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…