Related papers: Dust in the first galaxies
The first generation of stars was formed from primordial gas. Numerical simulations suggest that the first stars were predominantly very massive, with typical masses M > 100 Mo. These stars were responsible for the reionization of the…
Dust extinction curves provide one of the main avenues to understanding the detailed nature of dust grains and accounting for the effects of dust on observations of many astrophysical objects. For the first time, spectroscopic ultraviolet…
Several lines of evidence suggest that early-type galaxies might have been very dusty during their initial evolutionary stages, characterized by intense star formation activity. The radio selection has provided, by far, the richest samples…
Motivated by recent observations suggesting that core-collapse supernovae may on average produce ~0.3 M_sun of dust, we explore a simple dust production scenario which applies to star-forming galaxies in the local environment (the…
The largest galaxies acquire their mass early on, when the Universe is still youthful. Cold streams violently feed these young galaxies a vast amount of fresh gas, resulting in very efficient star formation. Using a well resolved…
Observations of absorption lines in the spectra of distant QSOs offer a new approach for tracking the evolution of normal galaxies from early epochs to the present day. The damped Ly alpha systems are particularly suitable for measuring the…
The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to [Fe/H]\sim-5.5) are relics from the…
Current numerical studies suggest that the first galaxies formed a few stars at a time and were enriched only gradually by the first heavy elements. However, the large box sizes in these models cannot resolve primordial supernova explosions…
Interstellar dust links the formation of the first stars to the rocky planet we inhabit by playing a pivotal role in the cooling and fragmentation of molecular clouds, and catalyzing the formation of water and organic molecules. Despite its…
We have conducted an archival Spitzer study of 38 early-type galaxies (ETGs) in order to determine the origin of the dust in approximately half of this population. Our sample galaxies generally have good wavelength coverage from 3.6um to…
Existing observations are consistent with rich clusters of galaxies having no dust on $\simgt$ Mpc scales, while galaxy groups most probably do have dust distributed over $\lesssim$ Mpc scales. Dust in groups accounts for the observed…
Our current knowledge of cosmic star-formation history during the first two billion years (corresponding to redshift z >3) is mainly based on galaxies identified in rest-frame ultraviolet light. However, this population of galaxies is known…
We investigate the transition from primordial Population III (Pop III) star formation to normal Pop II star formation in the first galaxies using new cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. We find that while the first stars seed their host…
The presence of metals in hot cluster gas and in Ly-alpha absorbers, as well as the mass-metallicity relation of observed galaxies, suggest that galaxies lose a significant fraction of their metals to the intergalactic medium (IGM).…
Dust is a key component of galaxies, but its properties during the earliest eras of structure formation remain elusive. Here we present a simple semi-analytic model of the dust distribution in galaxies at $z \gtrsim 5$. We calibrate the…
The origin of dust in galaxy halos or in the circum-galactic medium (CGM) is still a mystery. We investigate if the radiation pressure in high-redshift ($z\sim 10$) galaxies can efficiently transport dust to halos. To clarify the first dust…
Interstellar dust at high Galactic latitudes can influence astronomical foreground subtraction, produce diffuse scattered light, and soften the ultraviolet spectra of quasars. In a sample of 94 sight lines toward quasars at high latitude…
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…
The gas-to-dust ratio of reddened stars in the Milky Way (MW), the Magellanic Clouds, and in general is usually expressed as a linear relation between the hydrogen column density, N(H), and the reddening, E(B-V), or extinction in the V band…
We present a study of the early build-up of dust in high redshift galaxies. The study is based on the analysis of 38 Damped Ly alpha systems (DLAs) for which we derive the fraction of iron atoms in dust form, f_{Fe}. The sample is…