Related papers: Jacquetium: a new, naturally-occurring chemical el…
A general framework for an emergent universe scenario has been given which makes use of an equation of state. The general features of the model have also been studied and possible primordial composition of the universe have been suggested.
Among the light elements created in the Big Bang, deuterium is one of the most difficult to detect but is also the one whose abundance depends most sensitively on the density of baryons. Thus, although we still have only a few positive…
It has been over 30 years since the first suggestion that the true ground state of cold hadronic matter might be not nuclear matter but rather strange quark matter (SQM). Ever since, searches for stable SQM have been proceeding in various…
This is a report on some highlights of some research on the rare light elements, lithium (Li), beryllium (Be), and boron (B), that I presented in my Henry Norris Russell Lecture in January, 2020. It is not a comprehensive review of work on…
Here, we ask a simple question, i.e. "at what cosmic time, at the earliest, did life first appear in the universe?" Given what we know about the universe today, there may be some partial answers to this question, but much will still have to…
Material discovery is a phenomenon practiced since the evolution of the world. The Discovery of materials had led to significant development in varied fields such as Science, Engineering and Technology etc., It had been a slow and…
The first eight elements of the periodic table are discussed: H, He, Li, Be, B, C, N, and O. They are referred to as key elements, given their important role in stellar evolution. It is noteworthy that all of them were initially synthesized…
The discovery of the accelerating universe in the late 1990s was a watershed moment in modern cosmology, as it indicated the presence of a fundamentally new, dominant contribution to the energy budget of the universe. Evidence for dark…
A mysterious increase of radiocarbon 14C ca. 775 AD in the Earth's atmosphere has been recently found by Miyake et al. (Nature, 486, 240, 2012). A possible source of this event has been discussed widely, the most likely being an extreme…
In this review we explore aspects of the field of astrobiology from an astronomical viewpoint. We therefore focus on the origin of life in the context of planetary formation, with additional emphasis on tracing the most abundant volatile…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
Developments in neutrino astronomy have been to a great extent motivated by the search for the sources of the cosmic rays, leading at a very early stage to the concept of a cubic kilometer neutrino detector. Almost four decades later such…
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is also the lightest and as such the most quantum of the elements, in the sense that quantum tunnelling, quantum delocalisation, and zero-point motion can be important. For practical…
How are the heavy elements formed? This has been a key open question in physics for decades. Recent direct detections of neutron star mergers and observations of evolved stars show signatures of chemical elements in the blue range of their…
Earth's volatile elements (H, C, and N) are essential to maintaining habitable conditions for metazoans and simpler life forms. However, identifying the sources (comets, meteorites, and trapped nebular gas) that supplied volatiles to Earth…
The abundances of the {\it rare} light elements, Li, Be, and B, provide clues about stellar structure and evolution, about Galactic evolution and about their nucleosynthesis, including production during the Big Bang. The abundances of the…
We will discuss some highlights concerning the chemical evolution of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. First we will describe the main ingredients necessary to build a model for the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. Then we will illustrate some…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
The deepest hole that has ever been dug is about 12 km deep. Geochemists analyze samples from the Earth's crust and from the top of the mantle. Seismology can reconstruct the density profile throughout all Earth, but not its composition. In…
The neutrino is the most elusive particle that we know and for many years physicists doubted that neutrinos might never be revealed. Today we know and we reveal neutrinos produced by different astrophysical objects and by interactions of…