Related papers: Supermassive Dark Star candidates seen by JWST?
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,…
Early data from JWST have revealed a bevy of high-redshift galaxy candidates with unexpectedly high stellar masses. An immediate concern is the consistency of these candidates with galaxy formation in the standard cosmological model. In the…
Population III stars were the first stars to form after the Big Bang, and are believed to have made the earliest contribution to the metal content of the universe beyond the products of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. These stars are…
Primordial stars formed in the early universe are thought to be hosted by compact dark matter (DM) halos. If DM consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), such stars may be powered by DM annihilation during the early phases…
Several lines of evidence suggest that some of the dark matter may be non-baryonic: the non-detection of various plausible baryonic candidates for dark matter inferred, e.g., from galaxy rotation curves and from cluster of galaxy velocity…
We summarize the properties of Infrared Dark Clouds, massive, dense, and cool aggregations of interstellar gas and dust that are found througout the Galaxy in projection against the strong mid-infrared background. We describe their…
Massive galaxies in the early Universe have been shown to be forming stars at surprisingly high rates. Prominent examples are dust-obscured galaxies which are luminous when observed at sub-millimeter (sub-mm) wavelengths and which may be…
We study the evolution of the first stars in the universe (Population III) from the early pre-Main Sequence until the end of helium burning in the presence of WIMP dark matter annihilation inside the stellar structure. The two different…
Supermassive primordial stars in hot, atomically-cooling haloes at $z \sim$ 15 - 20 may have given birth to the first quasars in the universe. Most simulations of these rapidly accreting stars suggest that they are red, cool hypergiants,…
Supermagnified stars are gravitationally lensed individual stars that are located close to a caustic of a lensing galaxy cluster, and have their flux magnified by a large enough factor (typically ~ 1000) to make them detectable with present…
The existence of supermassive black holes is supported by a growing body of observations. Supermassive black holes and their formation events are likely candidates for detection by proposed long-wavelength, space-based gravitational wave…
On the basis of a new quantum field theory without divergence presented by us we identify W-matter with dark matter and guess that the two new stars RXJ1865 and 3C58 and quasi-stellar objects are the compounds of a F-celestial body with a…
The first stars were born from chemically pristine gas. They were likely massive, and thus they rapidly exploded as supernovae, enriching the surrounding gas with the first heavy elements. In the Local Group, the chemical signatures of the…
In the first billion years after the Big Bang, sources of ultraviolet (UV) photons are believed to have ionized intergalactic hydrogen, rendering the Universe transparent to UV radiation. Galaxies brighter than the characteristic luminosity…
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…
The identity of dark matter is one of the key outstanding problems in both particle and astrophysics. In this thesis, I describe a number of complementary searches for particle dark matter. I discuss how the impact of dark matter on stars…
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…
The first stars are the key to the formation of primitive galaxies, early cosmological reionization and chemical enrichment, and the origin of supermassive black holes. Unfortunately, in spite of their extreme luminosities, individual…
To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark…
The first generation of stars, often called Population III (or Pop III), form from metal-free primordial gas at redshifts 30 and below. They dominate the cosmic star formation history until redshifts 15 to 20, at which point the formation…