Related papers: Chances for earth-like planets and life around met…
Planets like the Earth cannot form unless elements heavier than helium are available. These heavy elements, or `metals', were not produced in the big bang. They result from fusion inside stars and have been gradually building up over the…
Several planets have recently been discovered around old metal-poor stars, implying that these planets are also old, formed in the early Universe. The canonical theory suggests that the conditions for their formation could not have existed…
The galactic environment has been suspected to influence planetary habitability in many ways. Very metal-poor regions of the Galaxy, or those largely devoid of atoms more massive than H and He, are thought to be unable to form habitable…
We combine constraints on galaxy formation histories with planet formation models, yielding the Earth-like and giant planet formation histories of the Milky Way and the Universe as a whole. In the Hubble Volume (10^13 Mpc^3), we expect…
Ancient, long-lived stars remain present in all components of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Born a few hundred million after the Big Bang and during a time that marked the very beginning of the chemical evolution, these stars display very…
A rapidly growing body of observational results suggests that planet formation takes place preferentially at high metallicity. In the core accretion model of planet formation this is expected because heavy elements are needed to form the…
We argue that all transient searches for planets in globular clusters have a very low detection probability. Planets of low metallicity stars typically do not reside at small orbital separations. The dependance of planetary system…
The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to [Fe/H]\sim-5.5) are relics from the…
Jovian planet formation has been shown to be strongly correlated with host star metallicity, which is thought to be a proxy for disk solids. Observationally, previous works have indicated that jovian planets preferentially form around stars…
The oldest, most metal-poor stars in the Galactic halo and satellite dwarf galaxies present an opportunity to explore the chemical and physical conditions of the earliest star forming environments in the Universe. We review the fields of…
We present preliminary results from our spectroscopic search for planets within 1 AU of metal-poor field dwarfs using NASA time with HIRES on Keck I. The core accretion model of gas giant planet formation is sensitive to the metallicity of…
Recently, it has been observed the extreme metal-poor stars in the Galactic halo, which must be formed just after Pop III objects. On the other hand, the first gas clouds of mass $\sim 10^6 M_{\odot}$ are supposed to be formed at $ z \sim $…
We review the possibility that metallicity could provide a diagnostic for the age of a galaxy, hence that the most metal-poor star forming galaxies in the local universe may be genuinely young. Indeed, observational evidence for downsizing…
Multiple generations of massive stars have lived and died during Cosmic History, invigorating host galaxies with ionizing photons, kinetic energy, fresh material and stellar-size black holes. At present, massive stars in the Small…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
We propose the concept of a "Galactic Habitable Zone" (GHZ). Analogous to the Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ), the GHZ is that region in the Milky Way where an Earth-like planet can retain liquid water on its surface and provide a…
Smaller terrestrial planets (< 0.3 Earth masses) are less likely to retain the substantial atmospheres and ongoing tectonic activity probably required to support life. A key element in determining if sufficiently massive "sustainably…
A galaxy's mean metallicity is usually closely correlated with its luminosity and mass. Consequently the most metal-poor galaxies in the local universe are dwarf galaxies. Blue compact dwarfs and tidal dwarfs tend to deviate from the…
We argue that extreme metal-poor stars show a high dispersion in metallicity, because their abundances are the outcome of very few supernova events. Abundance anomalies should appear because of the discrete range of progenitor masses. There…
We consider the habitability of Earth-analogs around stars of different masses, which is regulated by the stellar lifetime, stellar wind-induced atmospheric erosion, and biologically active ultraviolet (UV) irradiance. By estimating the…