Related papers: Explosive Chrysopoeia
The thermal and fragmentation properties of star-forming clouds have important consequences on the corresponding characteristic stellar mass. The initial composition of the gas within these clouds is a record of the nucleosynthetic products…
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the Universe. They appear connected to supernova remnants from massive stars or the merger of their remnants, and their brightness makes them temporarily detectable out to the larges…
We investigate the dust properties and star-formation signature of galaxies in the early universe by stacking 111227 objects in the recently released COSMOS catalogue on maps at wavelengths bracketing the peak of warmed dust emission. We…
In this talk, I review the Color Glass Condensate theory of gluon saturation, and its application to the early stages of heavy ion collisions.
We argue that extreme metal-poor stars show a high dispersion in metallicity, because their abundances are the outcome of very few supernova events. Abundance anomalies should appear because of the discrete range of progenitor masses. There…
A common mechanism to form primordial black holes in the early universe is by enhancing at small-scales the scalar perturbations generated during inflation. If these fluctuations have a large enough amplitude, they may collapse into…
Two interesting hypotheses about black holes have been proposed. The older one states that microscopic black holes can be accountable for the observed dark matter density. The newer one states that black holes are coupled to the expansion…
The long-wavelength optical properties of a plasmonic crystal composed of gold nanorod particles have been studied. Because of the strong coupling between the incident light and vibrations of free electrons, bulk polariton excitation can be…
The earliest phases of the chemical evolution of our Galaxy are analysed in the light of the recent VLT results (concerning abundance patterns in the most metal-poor stars of the Galactic halo) and of stellar nucleosynthesis calculations.…
The extremely luminous supernova SN 2006gy challenges the traditional view that the collapse of a stellar core is the only mechanism by which a massive star makes a supernova, because it seems too luminous by more than a factor of ten. Here…
The merging galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, known as the "bullet cluster," is one of the hottest clusters known. The X-ray emitting plasma exhibits bow-shock-like temperature and density jumps. The segregation of this plasma from the peaks of…
By making use of a class of steep exponential type of potentials, which has been recently used to describe quintessential inflation, we show how a unified picture for both inflation, dark energy and dark matter can emerge entirely through…
We analyze the possibility that bubbles of quark matter surviving the confinement phase transition might have become colour superconducting due to the enormous compression suffered by them. Because of the relatively high temperature of the…
It is shown that the acceleration of particles by a powerful relativistic jet associated with the activity of a supermassive black hole in the Galactic center several million years ago may explain the observed cosmic ray spectrum at…
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the Universe, and their origin and mechanism are the focus of intense research and debate. More than three decades after their discovery, and after pioneering breakthroughs from space and…
During the first several days after explosion, Type Ia supernova light curves probe the outer layers of the exploding star and therefore provide important clues for identifying their progenitors. We investigate how both the shallow…
According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase - but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different…
Based on millimeter-wavelength continuum observations we suggest that the recent 'spectacle' of comet 17P/Holmes can be explained by a thick, air-tight dust cover and the effects of H2O sublimation, which started when the comet arrived at…
A clump moving through the intracluster medium of a galaxy cluster can drive a bow shock trailed by a bullet-like core. In some cases, such as in the prototypical Bullet cluster, X-rays show a gas bullet with a protruding head and…
In these lectures, we develop the theory of the Colour Glass Condensate. This is the matter made of gluons in the high density environment characteristic of deep inelastic scattering or hadron-hadron collisions at very high energy. The…