Related papers: How big were the first cosmological objects?
Primordial supermassive stars (SMSs) formed in atomic-cooling halos at z ~ 15 - 20 are leading candidates for the seeds of the first quasars. Past numerical studies of the evolution of SMSs have typically assumed constant accretion rates…
In the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory of structure formation, virialized minihalos (with T_vir}<10^4 K) form in abundance at high redshift (z>6), during the cosmic ``dark ages.'' The hydrogen in these minihalos, the first nonlinear…
We show that the observed upper bound on the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of the stars in an early-type galaxy, sigma<400km/s, may have a simple dynamical origin within the LCDM cosmological model, under two main hypotheses. The first…
Early-type galaxies often contain a hot X-ray emitting interstellar medium (3-8E6 K) with an apparent radiative cooling time much less than a Hubble time. If unopposed by a heating mechanism, the gas will radiatively cool to temperatures <=…
Theoretical arguments and observations suggest that in massive halos ($>10^{12}\,M_\odot$), the circumgalactic medium (CGM) is dominated by a 'hot' phase with gas temperature near the virial temperature ($T \approx T_{\rm vir}$) and a…
We simulate the evolution of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in a universe dominated by a cosmological constant. We find that within a few Hubble times from the present epoch, the baryons will have two primary phases: one phase composed of…
Theoretical studies of structure formation find an inverse proportionality between the concentration of dark matter haloes and virial mass. This trend has been recently confirmed for virial masses Mvir > ~6e12 Msun by the observation of the…
(abridged) We use a one-dimensional hydrodynamical code to investigate the effects of preheating on gas accretion and cooling in cold dark matter halos. In the absence of radiative cooling, preheating reduces the amount of gas that can be…
In this paper we examine aspects of primordial star formation in a gravitino warm dark matter universe with a cosmological constant. We compare a set of simulations using a single cosmological realization but with a wide range of warm dark…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted and subsequently tidally destroyed ~100 low-mass galaxies in the past ~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus…
The balance of evidence indicates that individual galaxies and groups or clusters of galaxies are embedded in enormous distributions of cold, weakly interacting dark matter. These dark matter 'halos' provide the scaffolding for all luminous…
The asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) towards several nearby galaxies detected by Planck data is probably due to the rotation of "cold gas" clouds present in the galactic halos. In 1995 it had been proposed that galactic…
We use a non-equilibrium chemical network to revisit and study the effect of H_{2}, HD and LiH molecular cooling on a primordial element of gas. We solve both the thermal and chemical equations for a gas element with an initial temperature…
We investigate the possibility of very early formation of primordial star clusters from high-\sigma perturbations in cold dark matter dominated structure formation scenarios. For this we have developed a powerful 2-level hierarchical…
In popular cold dark matter cosmological scenarios, stars may have first appeared in significant numbers around a redshift of 10 or so, as the gas within protogalactic halos with virial temperatures in excess of 20,000 K (corresponding to…
We have used the hydrodynamical AMR code ENZO to investigate the dynamical evolution of the gas at the centre of dark matter haloes with virial velocities of ~ 20 - 30 kms and virial temperatures of ~ 13000-30000 K at z ~ 15 in a…
Young stellar objects often drive powerful bipolar outflows which evolve on time scales of a few years. An increasing number of these outflows has been detected in X-rays implying the existence of million degree plasma almost co-spatial…
We explore the effects of magnetic energy dissipation on the formation of the first stars. For this purpose, we follow the evolution of primordial chemistry in the presence of magnetic fields in the post-recombination universe until the…
The formation and evolution of low-mass stars within dense halos of dark matter (DM) leads to evolution scenarios quite different from the classical stellar evolution. As a result of our detailed numerical work, we describe these new…
The discussion of cosmological parameters used to be a source of embarrassment to cosmologists. Today, measurements of the cosmological parameters are leading the way into the era of precision cosmology. The CMB temperature is measured to…