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Recent observations of hydrogen absorption that occurred when the first stars turned on may give insights into the nature of dark matter.
Radioactivity was discovered as a by-product of searching for elements with suitable chemical properties. Understanding its characteristics led to the development of nuclear physics, understanding that unstable configurations of nucleons…
Neutron stars were first posited in the early thirties, and discovered as pulsars in late sixties; however, only recently are we beginning to understand the matter they contain. This talk describes the continuing development of a consistent…
We present recent work on using astronomical observations of neutron stars to reveal unique insights into nuclear matter that cannot be obtained from laboratories on Earth. First, we discuss our measurement of the rapid cooling of the…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
In these lecture notes we review the current knowledge about the formation of the first luminous objects. We start from the cosmological context of hierarchical models of structure formation, and discuss the main physical processes which…
Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a…
The origins of the elements and isotopes of cosmic material is a critical aspect of understanding the evolution of the universe. Nucleosynthesis typically requires physical conditions of high temperatures and densities. These are found in…
We review current understanding of star formation, outlining an overall theoretical framework and the observations that motivate it. A conception of star formation has emerged in which turbulence plays a dual role, both creating…
For almost three decades it has been known that the study of astro-physically important nuclear reactions between stable nuclei requires the use of low-background, underground accelerator laboratories. The Felsenkeller shallow-underground…
Neutron stars are one of the most extreme objects in the universe, with densities that can exceed those of atomic nuclei and gravitational fields that are among the strongest known. Theoretical and observational research on neutron stars…
The earliest stars to form in the Universe were the first sources of light, heat and metals after the Big Bang. The products of their evolution will have had a profound impact on subsequent generations of stars. Recent studies of primordial…
The determination of chemical abundances in star-forming galaxies and the study of their evolution on cosmological timescales are powerful tools for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. This contribution presents the latest results…
A new line of research on Dark Stars is reviewed, which suggests that the first stars to exist in the universe were powered by dark matter heating rather than by fusion. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which may be there own…
Neutron stars are the densest objects known in our visible universe. Properties of matter inside a neutron star are encoded in its equation of state, which has wide-ranging uncertainty from a theoretical perspective. With the current…
The majority of the matter in the universe is still unidentified and under investigation by both direct and indirect means. Many experiments searching for the recoil of dark-matter particles off target nuclei in underground laboratories…
During its early evolution the Universe provided a laboratory to probe fundamental physics at high energies. Relics from those early epochs, such as the light elements synthesized during primordial nucleosynthesis when the Universe was only…
The universe would have been completely dark between the epoch of recombination and the development of the first non-linear structure. But at redshifts beyond 5 -- perhaps even beyond 20 -- stars formed within `subgalaxies' and created the…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the James Webb Space Telescope are transforming our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe. By combining their capabilities, these observatories provide…
The search for the first stars formed from metal-free gas in the universe is one of the key issues in astronomy because it relates to many fields, such as the formation of stars and galaxies, the evolution of the universe, and the origin of…