Related papers: Astronomy: Trouble at first light
I review recent progress in understanding the formation of the first stars and quasars. The initial conditions for their emergence are given by the now firmly established model of cosmological structure formation. Numerical simulations of…
Dark matter (DM) in protostellar halos can dramatically alter the current theoretical framework for the formation of the first stars. Heat from supersymmetric DM annihilation can overwhelm any cooling mechanism, consequently impeding the…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
Modern numerical simulations of the formation of the first stars predict that the first stars formed in multiples. In those cases, the chemical yields of multiple supernova explosions may have contributed to the formation of a next…
The abundances of the {\it rare} light elements, Li, Be, and B, provide clues about stellar structure and evolution, about Galactic evolution and about their nucleosynthesis, including production during the Big Bang. The abundances of the…
The properties of the first galaxies are shaped in large part by the first generations of stars, which emit high energy radiation and unleash both large amounts of mechanical energy and the first heavy elements when they explode as…
The elegance of inflationary cosmology and cosmological perturbation theory ends with the formation of the first stars and galaxies, the initial sources of light that launched the phenomenologically rich process of cosmic reionization. Here…
The observation that old, massive galaxies have a larger fraction of low-mass stars than their younger, lower-mass counterparts adds to mounting evidence that star formation may have been different in the early Universe.
The transition between the nearly smooth initial state of the Universe and its clumpy state today occurred during the epoch when the first stars and low-luminosity quasars formed. For Cold Dark Matter cosmologies, the radiation produced by…
The universe would have been completely dark between the epoch of recombination and the development of the first non-linear structure. But at redshifts beyond 5 -- perhaps even beyond 20 -- stars formed within `subgalaxies' and created the…
We perform a large set of radiation hydrodynamics simulations of primordial star formation in a fully cosmological context. Our statistical sample of 100 First Stars show that the first generation of stars have a wide mass distribution…
The first stars to form in the Universe may be powered by the annihilation of weakly interacting dark matter particles. These so-called dark stars, if observed, may give us a clue about the nature of dark matter. Here we examine which…
The process of star formation from metal-free gas is investigated by following the evolution of accreting protostars with emphasis on the properties of massive objects. The main aim is to establish the physical processes that determine the…
An impressive bulk of multiple astronomical observations indicates that there are plenty of objects in the universe with the age which cannot be explained by the conventional theory. A model is considered which successfully describes all…
The early stage of the Universe is discussed and the time lengths of its first days are given. If we denote the Hubble time in the zero-gravity limit by T (approximately 12.16 billion years), and T(n) denotes the length of the n-th day,…
We describe observations in the nearby universe (<100 Mpc) with a 10-m or larger space-based telescope having imaging and spectral capabilities in the range 912-9000 \AA that would enable advances in the fields of massive stars, young…
We have proposed that the first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the Universe may be Dark Stars (DS), powered by dark matter heating rather than by nuclear fusion. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which may be their own…
Our current understanding of the star formation histories of early-type galaxies is reviewed, in the context of recent observational studies of their ultra-violet (UV) properties. Combination of UV and optical spectro-photometric data…
We describe results from a fully self-consistent three dimensional hydrodynamical simulation of the formation of one of the first stars in the Universe. Dark matter dominated pre-galactic objects form because of gravitational instability…
The recent discovery of a hyper metal-poor (HMP) star, whose metallicity Fe/H is smaller than 1/100,000 of the solar ratio, together with one earlier HMP star, has raised a challenging question if these HMP stars are the actual first…