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As the panel on Planetary Systems and Star Formation (PSF) is fully aware, the next decade will see major advances in our understanding of these areas of research. To quote from their charge, these advances will occur in studies of solar…
The cosmic microwave background and the cosmic expansion can be interpreted as evidence that the Universe underwent an extremely hot and dense phase about 14 Gyr ago. The nucleosynthesis computations tell us that the Universe emerged from…
A massive black hole resides in the center of most, perhaps all galaxies. The one in the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, provides a uniquely accessible laboratory for studying in detail the connections and interactions between a…
How does subatomic matter organize itself? Neutron stars are cosmic laboratories uniquely poised to answer this fundamental question that lies at the heart of nuclear science. Newly commissioned rare isotope facilities, telescopes operating…
Neutron stars -- compact objects with masses similar to that of our Sun but radii comparable to the size of a city -- contain the densest form of matter in the universe that can be probed in terrestrial laboratories as well as in earth- and…
The current picture of the collapse and explosion of massive stars and the formation of neutron stars is reviewed. According to the favored scenario, however by no means proven and undisputed, neutrinos deposit the energy of the explosion…
Stars form within molecular clouds but our understanding of this fundamental process remains hampered by the complexity of the physics that drives their evolution. We review our observational and theoretical knowledge of molecular clouds…
Ever since the discovery of neutron stars it has been realized that they serve as probes of a physical regime that cannot be accessed in laboratories: strongly degenerate matter at several times nuclear saturation density. Existing nuclear…
In these lectures I review observations of star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies to develop a physical intuition for understanding star formation in the local and high-redshift Universe. A lot of this material is…
Studying the physical processes occurring in the region just above the magnetic poles of strongly magnetized, accreting binary neutron stars is essential to our understanding of stellar and binary system evolution. Perhaps more importantly,…
The hope is that in the near future neutrino astronomy, born with the identification of thermonuclear fusion in the sun and the particle processes controlling the fate of a nearby supernova, will reach throughout and beyond our Galaxy and…
We present what we know on nucleosynthesis in the Universe and hypotheses that have been made in this regard. A brief description of the Universe's evolution during its different stages is offered, indicating which are the periods and…
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of cosmic chemical evolution. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements, and the…
Nuclear reactions in stars are difficult to measure directly in the laboratory at the small astrophysical energies. In recent years indirect methods with rare isotopes have been developed and applied to extract low-energy astrophysical…
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Elements heavier than helium are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
The first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the universe may be Dark Stars, powered by dark matter heating rather than by fusion. Weakly interacting massive particles, which are their own antiparticles, can annihilate and provide…
Molecular clouds are the principle stellar nurseries of our universe, keeping them in the focus of both observational and theoretical studies. From observations, some of the key properties of molecular clouds are well known but many…
A neutron star is pictured as a gigantic nucleus overwhelmed by the number of neutrons, unlike real atomic nuclei, that have a similar number of neutrons and protons. Is this true? What if we could find, or create nuclei without protons?…
It is a current opinion that thermonuclear fusion is the main source of the star activity. It is shown below that this source is not unique. There is another electrostatic mechanism of the energy generation which accompanies thermonuclear…
The physics of stars, their workings and their evolution, is a goldmine of problems in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. We discuss many examples that illustrate the possibility of deepening student's knowledge of statistical…