Related papers: Interstellar dust revealed by light from cosmic da…
The first generation of stars were born a few hundred million years after the big bang. These stars synthesized elements heavier than H and He, that are later expelled into the interstellar medium, initiating the rise of metals. Within this…
Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of…
Infrared surveys provide essential insights on galaxy evolution. If near-IR studies suggest mild evolution of stellar populations with cosmic time, indications of a substantial evolution have been seen in the far-IR, although the available…
Carbon macromolecules are intermediates between small gas-phase species and larger dust structures. I illustrate how observations and dedicated laboratory experiments support this picture.
There are at least three sources of cosmic quarks in the universe. One, the quark nuggets which may survive beyond a certain baryon number during the phase transition from quarks to hadrons microseconds after the big bang. These quark…
Whenever gas is blown out of a galaxy, chances are that it contains some cosmic dust. This dust is an important part of the metals budget for the circumgalactic and intergalactic media, and traces the outflow and stripping history of the…
Observational evidence seems to indicate that the depletion of interstellar carbon into dust shows rather wide variations and that carbon undergoes rather rapid recycling in the interstellar medium (ISM). Small hydrocarbon grains are…
An impressive bulk of multiple astronomical observations indicates that there are plenty of objects in the universe with the age which cannot be explained by the conventional theory. A model is considered which successfully describes all…
Lightning is present in all solar system planets which form clouds in their atmospheres. Cloud formation outside our solar system is possible in objects with much higher temperatures than on Earth or on Jupiter: Brown dwarfs and giant…
Organic compounds are ubiquitous in space: they are found in diffuse clouds, in the envelopes of evolved stars, in dense star-forming regions, in protoplanetary disks, in comets, on the surfaces of minor planets, and in meteorites and…
A sizable fraction of the heavy elements synthesized by stars in galaxies condenses into sub-micron-sized solid-state particles, known as dust grains. Dust produces a wavelength-dependent attenuation, $A_\lambda$, of the galaxy emission,…
There remain many open questions relating to the depletion of elements into dust, e.g., exactly how are C and O incorporated into dust in dense clouds and, in particular, what drives the disappearance of oxygen in the denser interstellar…
Supernovae have long been proposed to be efficient dust producers in galaxies. Observations in the mid-infrared indicate that dust forms a few hundred days after the stellar explosion. Yet, the chemical type and the amount of dust produced…
Many things in current interstellar dust studies are taken as well understood givens by much of the community. For example, it is widely held that interstellar dust is made up of only three components, i.e., astronomical silicates, graphite…
Star formation in half of massive galaxies was quenched by the time the Universe was three billion years old. Very low amounts of molecular gas appear responsible for this, at least in some cases, though morphological gas stabilization,…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
The most distant -ray burst yet sighted is the earliest astronomical object ever observed in cosmic history. This ancient beacon offers a glimpse of the little-known cosmic dark ages.
In this chapter we review the astrophysical origins of Earth's carbon, starting from the products of the Big Bang and culminating with the Earth's formation. We review the measured compositions of different primitive objects including…
The first galaxies contain stars born out of gas with little or no metals. The lack of metals is expected to inhibit efficient gas cooling and star formation but this effect has yet to be observed in galaxies with oxygen abundance relative…
I show that interstellar films of material thinner than a micron, drift away from the Galactic plane as a result of stellar radiation pressure. Such films, whether produced naturally by dust coagulation in proto-planetary disks or…