Related papers: Explosive Chrysopoeia
At early times the Universe was filled up with an extremely dense and hot gas. Due to the expansion it cooled below the binding energies of atoms which led to the formation of the first nuclei. In the physical environment of the…
While the modern stellar IMF shows a rapid decline with increasing mass, theoretical investigations suggest that very massive stars (>100 solar masses) may have been abundant in the early universe. Other calculations also indicate that,…
It is discussed how the ideas of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, conceived long ago during the nineteenth century, underly why cosmological dark matter exists and originated in the first three years of the universe in the form…
The first light from a supernova (SN) emerges once the SN shock breaks out of the stellar surface. The first light, typically a UV or X-ray flash, is followed by a broken power-law decay of the luminosity generated by radiation that leaks…
We present the abundance analysis of a sample of more than 120 red giants in the globular cluster (GC) NGC 1851, based on FLAMES spectra. We find a small but detectable metallicity spread. This spread is compatible with the presence of two…
The chemical composition of stars with extremely low metal contents (taking ``metals'' to mean all elements other than hydrogen and helium) provides us with information on the masses of the stars that produced the first metals. Such a…
An efficient source of hydrated electrons generated by visible light has the potential to have a major impact on solar homogeneous catalysis. Diamond has potentially a high capability of emitting hydrated electrons, but only using…
Globular clusters in most large galaxies are a mixture of metal-poor and metal-rich (bimodal), but the halo stars are almost entirely metal-rich. This and other lines of evidence argue that the metal-poor globular clusters formed within…
Following on after two previous papers discussing the formation of primordial black holes in the early universe, we present here results from an in-depth investigation of the extent to which primordial black hole formation in the radiative…
Gold has been long thought as an inert metal which finds most of its use in jewelry and monetary exchange. However, catalysis by gold has rapidly become a hot topic in chemistry ever since Haruta and Hutchings found gold to be an…
Recent observations of hydrogen absorption that occurred when the first stars turned on may give insights into the nature of dark matter.
We report on time-resolved coherent diffraction imaging of gas-phase silver nanoparticles, strongly heated via their plasmon resonance. The x-ray diffraction images reveal a broad range of phenomena for different excitation strengths, from…
As a solution to the well-known problem that the shock wave potentially responsible for the explosion of a supernova actually tends to stall, we propose a new energy source arising from our model for dark matter. Our earlier model proposed…
The first massive astrophysical black holes likely formed at high redshifts (z>10) at the centers of low mass (~10^6 Msun) dark matter concentrations. These black holes grow by mergers and gas accretion, evolve into the population of bright…
Electron temperatures, densities, ionic and elemental abundances of helium, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, sulfur and neon were derived for a sample of bulge planetary nebulae, representative of its intermediate mass population. Using these…
I introduce the concept of the Color Glass Condensate. I review data from HERA and RHIC which suggest that such a universal form of matter has been found.
Many galaxies at high redshift have peculiar morphologies dominated by 10^8-10^9 Mo kpc-sized clumps. Using numerical simulations, we show that these "clump clusters" can result from fragmentation in gravitationally unstable primordial…
The X-ray colors and X-ray-to-optical luminosity ratios (L_X/L_B) of 61 early- type galaxies observed with the ROSAT PSPC are determined. The colors indicate that the X-ray spectral properties of galaxies vary as a function of L_X/L_B. The…
The formation of gold nanowires in vacuum at room temperature reveals a periodic spectrum of exceptionally stable diameters. This is identified as shell structure similar to that which was recently discovered for alkali metals at low…
In the presence of the local-type primordial non-Gaussianity, it is known that the clustering of primordial black holes (PBHs) emerges even on super-horizon scales at the formation time. This effect has been investigated in the high-peak…