Related papers: The Case for Astrons
Context. Efforts to look for signatures of the first stars have concentrated on metal-poor halo objects. However, the low end of the bulge metallicity distribution has been shown to host some of the oldest objects in the Milky Way and hence…
Primordial superheavy particles, considered as the source of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) and produced in local processes in the early Universe, should bear some strictly or approximately conserved charge to be sufficiently stable…
The cosmological lithium problem -- that theory predicts a primordial abundance far higher than the observed value -- has resisted decades of attempts by cosmologists, nuclear physicists, and astronomers alike to root out systematics. We…
We have constrained the charge-mass ($\varepsilon-m$) phase space of millicharged particles through the simulation of the rotational evolution of neutron stars, where an extra slow-down effect due to the accretions of millicharged dark…
This paper reports improvements and new results for a well developed theory of tachyons (faster-than-light particles) and follows the suggestion that neutrinos - especially the low energy neutrinos in the Cosmic Neutrino Background - may be…
Powerful radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN) with large Mpc-scale jets have been theoretically motivated as emitters of high-energy cosmic rays. Recent radio observations have established a populous class of young radio-loud galaxies…
Primordial nucleosynthesis provides a probe of the universal abundance of baryons when the universe was only a few minutes old. Recent observations of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) probe the baryon abundance when the…
The search for the physical mechanism underlying the observational evidence for the acceleration of the recent universe is a compelling goal of modern fundamental cosmology. Here we quantitatively study a class of homogeneous and isotropic…
If primordial black holes of $\mathcal{O}(1-100) M_{\odot}$ constitute a significant portion of the dark matter in the Universe, they should be very abundant in our Galaxy. We present here a detailed analysis of the radio and X-ray emission…
From studying the cosmic microwave background, we know our Universe started out very simple. It was by and large homogeneous and isotropic, with small fluctuations that can be described by linear perturbation theory. In stark contrast, the…
Nine metal-polluted white dwarfs are observed with medium-resolution optical spectroscopy,where photospheric abundances are determined and interpreted through comparison against solar system objects. An improved method of making such…
We investigate how current and proposed observations of neutron stars can lead to an understanding of the state of their interiors and the key unknowns: the typical neutron star radius and the neutron star maximum mass. A theoretical…
One of the primary targets of current and future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while interesting…
Understanding the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies represents one of the most exciting frontiers in astronomy. Since the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen at early times, the most promising method for…
The chemical abundance patterns observed in metal-poor Galactic halo stars contain the signature of the first supernovae, and thus allows us to probe the first stars that formed in the universe. We construct a theoretical model for the…
The majority of Galactic globular clusters (GCs) contain multiple stellar populations displaying specific chemical abundance variations. In particular, GCs generally contain a `primordial' population with abundances similar to field stars,…
Motivated by recent astrophysical observations of quasar absorption systems, we formulate a simple theory where the electron to proton mass ratio $\mu =m_{e}/m_{p}$ is allowed to vary in space-time. In such a minimal theory only the…
We investigate various anisotropic spherical distributions of charged celestial bodies within the context of f(R) gravity, where R represents the Ricci scalar. The properties of specific charged compact objects are analyzed by using the…
Recent numerical simulations have shown that the unstable disk within the central regime of the primordial gas cloud fragments to form multiple protostars on several scales. Their evolution depends on the mass accretion phenomenon,…
A significant fraction of the stellar population in the cusp around central black holes of galaxies consists of compact remnants of evolved stars, such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and stellar mass black holes. We estimate the rate of…