Related papers: Local Starbursts: Perspectives from the Optical
Observations have revealed prodigious amounts of star formation in starburst galaxies as traced by dust and molecular emission, even at large redshifts. Recent work shows that for both nearby spiral galaxies and distant starbursts, the…
Popular models for the origin of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) include short-lived massive stars as the progenitors of the fireballs. Hence the redshift distribution of GRBs should track the cosmic star formation rate of massive stars accurately.…
The most extreme starbursts occur in galaxy mergers, and it is now acknowledged that dynamical triggering has a primary importance in star formation. This triggering is due partly to the enhanced velocity dispersion provided by…
Far-ultraviolet spectra obtained with $FUSE$ show that the strong $CII\lambda$1036 interstellar absorption-line is essentially black in five of the UV-brightest local starburst galaxies. Since the opacity of the neutral ISM below the…
In the past decade, our understanding of galaxy evolution has been revolutionized by the discovery that luminous, dusty, starburst galaxies were 1,000 times more abundant in the early Universe than at present. It has, however, been…
We present new narrow-band H alpha imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope of two redshift 0.91 galaxies that have been lensed by foreground galaxy cluster Abell 2390. These data probe spatial scales as small as 0.3 kpc, providing a…
From stellar spectra, a variety of physical properties of stars can be derived. In particular, the chemical composition of stellar atmospheres can be inferred from absorption line analyses. These provide key information on large scales,…
We report the results of J-band infrared spectroscopy of a sample of 13 z=1 field galaxies drawn from the Canada-France Redshift Survey, targeting galaxies whose redshifts place the rest frame H-alpha line emission from HII regions in…
We have analyzed the properties of the star formation episodes taking place in a sample of Blue Compact and Irregular galaxies by comparing their multiwavelength observational properties with the predictions of evolutionary population…
We present an atlas of starburst galaxy emission lines spanning 10 orders of magnitude in ionizing flux and 7 orders of magnitude in hydrogen number density. Coupling SEDs from Starburst99 with photoionization calculations from Cloudy, we…
We present a review of observational studies of high-mass star formation, based mainly on our own research. It includes surveys of high-mass star-forming regions in various molecular lines and in continuum, investigations of filamentary…
A fundamental quest of modern astronomy is to locate the earliest galaxies and study how they influenced the intergalactic medium a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The abundance of star-forming galaxies is known to decline…
One of the key questions in understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies is how starbursts affect the assembly of stellar populations in galaxies over time. We define a burst indicator ($\eta$), which compares a galaxy's star…
The cosmological origin of carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the Universe, is not well known and matter of heavy debate. We investigate the behavior of C/O to O/H in order to constrain the production mechanism of carbon. We…
We obtained medium-resolution ultraviolet (UV) spectra between 1150 and 1450 Angstroms of the four UV-bright, infrared (IR)-luminous starburst galaxies IRAS F08339+6517, NGC 3256, NGC 6090, and NGC 7552 using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph…
Infrared imaging properties of dusty winds around late-type stars are investigated in detail, employing a self-consistent model that couples the equations of motion and radiative transfer. Because of general scaling properties, the angular…
Stellar emission and absorption lines are routinely observed in galaxies at redshifts up to 5 with spectrographs on 8-10m class telescopes. While the overall spectra are well understood and have been successfully modeled using empirical and…
We measure Doppler shifts of interstellar absorption lines in HST/STIS spectra of individual star clusters in nearby UV-selected galaxies. Values for systemic velocities, which are needed to quantify outflow speeds, are taken from the…
High quality infrared spectra of active galaxies including the stellar absorption features of Si at 1.59 um, CO(6,3) at 1.62 um, and CO(2,0) at 2.29 um are used to measure the stellar mass to light ratio at 1.65 um (M_H/L) and investigate…
Galactic outflows provide important feedback effects to regulate the evolution of host galaxies. Two primary diagnostics of outflows are broad and/or blueshifted emission and absorption lines. Even though well-established methods exist to…