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The first stars are believed to have formed a few hundred million years after the big bang in so-called dark matter minihalos with masses ~10^6 M_sun. Their radiation lit up the Universe for the first time, and the supernova explosions that…
Since their first discovery in the late 1960s, Gamma-ray bursts have attracted an exponentially growing interest from the international community due to their central role in the most highly debated open questions of the modern research of…
The formation of the first generations of stars at redshifts z > 15-20 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the universe to one of increasing complexity. We here review recent progress in understanding the assembly…
The first stars in the Universe form when chemically pristine gas heats as it falls into dark matter potential wells, cools radiatively due to the formation of molecular hydrogen, and becomes self-gravitating. We demonstrate with…
In this chapter, we will cover how stars form from the stellar nurseries that are giant molecular clouds. We will first review the physical processes that compete to regulate star formation. We then review star formation in turbulent,…
Massive stars have a profound influence on the Universe, but their formation remains poorly understood. We review the current status of observational and theoretical research in this field, describing the various stages of an evolutionary…
Recent developments in multi-dimensional simulations of core-collapse supernovae have considerably improved our understanding of this complex phenomenon. In addition to that, one-dimensional (1D) studies have been employed to study the…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
In order to understand the origin and evolution of comets, one must decipher the processes that formed and processed cometary ice and dust. Cometary materials have diverse physical and chemical properties and are mixed in various ways.…
The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years…
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in our understanding of the extreme universe, which in turn points to even deeper questions to be further addressed. History has shown that the symbiosis between direct observations and laboratory…
Most stars are born in rich young stellar clusters (YSCs) embedded in giant molecular clouds. The most massive stars live out their short lives there, profoundly influencing their natal environments by ionizing HII regions, inflating…
The physics of neutron star crusts is vast, involving many different research fields, from nuclear and condensed matter physics to general relativity. This review summarizes the progress, which has been achieved over the last few years, in…
Galactic nuclei and globular clusters act as laboratories in which nature experiments with normal stars, neutron stars and black holes, through collisions and through the formation of bound states, in the form of binaries. The main…
The most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum bears the purest clues to the synthesis of atomic nuclei in the universe. The decay of radioactive species, synthesized in stellar environments and ejected into the interstellar…
Understanding where elements were formed has been a key goal in astrophysics for nearly a century, with answers involving cosmology, stellar burning, and cosmic explosions. Since 1957, the origin of the heaviest elements (formed via the…
The understanding and modeling of the structure and evolution of stars is based on statistical physics as well as on hydrodynamics. Today, a precise identification and proper description of the physical processes at work in stellar…
While astrophysical and cosmological probes provide a remarkably precise and consistent picture of the quantity and general properties of dark matter, its fundamental nature remains one of the most significant open questions in physics.…
Metal-poor stars hold the key to our understanding of the origin of the elements and the chemical evolution of the Universe. This chapter describes the process of discovery of these rare stars, the manner in which their surface abundances…
Stars play a key role in the evolution of the Universe, as sources of radiation, as dynamical engines, and as chemical factories. Outputs of stellar models are then central to various studies in astrophysics. Stellar physics links…