Related papers: Explosive Chrysopoeia
Lightning balls are very rare natural phenomena that appear as free floating glowing globs, usually during electric activity in the atmosphere of the Earth. Each year, hundreds of eyewitness accounts of such strange events are reported to…
We study the clustering properties of the first galaxies formed in the Universe. We find that, due to chemical enrichment of the inter-stellar medium by isolated Population III stars formed in mini-halos at redshift z>30, the…
Some early-type galaxies show a correlation between color and integrated magnitude among the brighter metal-poor globular clusters (GCs). This phenomenon, known as the blue tilt, implies a mass-metallicity relationship among these clusters.…
Hot, X-ray emitting gaseous halos around massive elliptical galaxies are a result of both stellar mass loss and inflow toward the overdensity from which giant ellipticals and their associated galaxy groups formed. The metal abundance in…
The almost perfect uniformity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 appears to present clearcut evidence that the universe was uniform and in equilibrium at the decoupling transition…
We explore high-redshift gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as promising tools to probe pre-galactic metal enrichment. We utilize the bright afterglow of a Pop III GRB exploding in a primordial dwarf galaxy as a luminous background source, and…
We use a suite of cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations to investigate the chemical enrichment history of the Universe. Specifically, we trace the origin of the metals back in time to investigate when various gas phases were enriched and…
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…
We present a model of globular cluster self-enrichment. In the protogalaxy, cold and dense clouds embedded in the hot protogalactic medium are assumed to be the progenitors of galactic halo globular clusters. The massive stars of a first…
Collisions and mergers of gas-rich galaxies trigger bursts of star and cluster formation. Of the thousands of clusters typically formed during a major merger, only the most massive and compact survive for Gigayears as globular clusters…
Bulges, often identified with the spheroidal component of a galaxy, have a complex pedigree. Massive bulges are generally red and old, but lower mass bulges have broader dispersions in color that may be correlated with disk colors. This…
Despite decades-old predictions of the expected presence of dozens of cataclysmic variables in the cores of globular clusters, the number of irrefutable, out-bursting candidates is still barely a handful. Using multi-wavelength, multi-epoch…
Since detonation is the only established theory that allows rapid burning producing a high pressure that can be sustained in open areas, the generally accepted opinion was that the mechanism explaining the high rate of combustion in dust…
About 1% of giant stars have been shown to have large surface Li abundances, which is unexpected according to standard stellar evolution models. Several scenarios for lithium production have been proposed, but it is still unclear why these…
Although they were discovered more than 25 years ago, gamma-ray bursts are still a mystery. Even their characteristic distance is highly uncertain. All that we can be confident about is that they involve compact objects and relativistic…
In spite that the Crab supernova in 1054 A.D. was studied over the years, it is still not clear what type of event produced the explosion. The most detailed and reliable source of the observed light curve is recorded in the Chinese and…
Extremely metal poor stars have been the focus of much recent attention owing to the expectation that their chemical abundances can shed light on the metal and dust yields of the earliest supernovae. We present our most realistic simulation…
From spectrophotometric and chemical evolutionary modelling of interacting and merging galaxies we predict abundances of burst stars and of globular clusters (GCs) that may be formed in strong bursts. Observations of young GCs in merger…
We present nanoscale explosives as a novel type of dark matter detector and study the ignition properties. When a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle WIMP from the Galactic Halo elastically scatters off of a nucleus in the detector, the…
A recent understanding on how quantum effects may affect black-hole evolution opens new scenarios for dark matter, in connection with the presence of black holes in the very early universe. Quantum fluctuations of the geometry allow for…