Related papers: Probing the `Dark Age' with NGST
Feedback effects due to massive stars and supernovae in the first objects are shown to strongly regulate both galaxy formation/evolution and the reionization process. Here we review the most important ones in some detail. We discuss how…
Astronomical observations of recent years show that the universe at high redshifts about ten is densely populated by the early formed objects: bright galaxies, quasars, gamma-bursters, and contains a lot of metals and dust. Such rich early…
The study of high-redshift objects is rapidly developing, allowing to build the star formation history of the Universe. Since most of the flux from starbursts comes out in the FIR region, the submm and mm are privileged domains for the…
The "cosmic dawn" refers to the period of the Universe's history when stars and black holes first formed and began heating and ionizing hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM). Though exceedingly difficult to detect directly, the first…
Large telescopes have allowed astronomers to observe galaxies that formed as early as 850 million years after the Big Bang. We predict when the first star that astronomers can observe formed in the universe, accounting for the first time…
Understanding the origin of the elements has been a decades long pursuit, with many open questions still remaining. Old stars found in the Milky Way and its dwarf satellite galaxies can provide answers because they preserve clean elemental…
The first billion years of the Universe is a pivotal time: stars, black holes (BHs) and galaxies form and assemble, sowing the seeds of galaxies as we know them today. Detecting, identifying and understand- ing the first galaxies and BHs is…
The cosmic microwave background and the cosmic expansion can be interpreted as evidence that the Universe underwent an extremely hot and dense phase about 14 Gyr ago. The nucleosynthesis computations tell us that the Universe emerged from…
The first generations of astrophysical objects made a substantial impact on our Universe with their radiation. X-rays from the first sources, with large mean free paths, likely quickly heated the intergalactic medium (IGM). The second…
The period between the creation of the cosmic microwave background at a redshift of ~1000 and the formation of the first stars and black holes that re-ionize the intergalactic medium at redshifts of 10-20 is currently unobservable. The…
A remarkable result of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observations is that the universe was significantly reionized at large redshifts. The standard explanation is that massive stars formed early and reionized the universe…
A cosmologically significant population of very luminous high-redshift galaxies has recently been discovered at submm wavelengths. Advances in submm detector technologies have opened this new window on the distant Universe. Here we discuss…
The history of galaxy formation via star formation and stellar mass assembly rates is now known with some certainty, yet the connection between high redshift and low redshift galaxy populations is not yet clear. By identifying and studying…
The oldest stars in the universe retain to a great extent detailed information on the chemical composition of the interstellar medium at the time of their birth. Hence the earliest phases of Galactic chemical evolution and nucleosynthesis…
How and when did galaxies form and assemble their stars and stellar mass? The answer to these questions, so crucial to astrophysics and cosmology, requires the full reconstruction of the so called cosmic star formation rate density (SFRD),…
The first galaxies formed at high redshifts, and were likely substantially less massive than typical galaxies in the local universe. We argue that (1) the reionization of a clumpy intergalactic medium by redshift z=6, (2) its enrichment by…
Current theory and measurements establish the age of the universe as ca. 13.8 billion years. For the first several hundred million years of its existence, it was a dark, opaque void. After that, the hydrogen atoms comprising most of the…
We calculate the expected Mid-IR molecular hydrogen line emission from the first objects in the universe. Due to their low masses, the stellar feedback from massive stars is able to blowaway their gas content and collect it into a cooling…
Ultraviolet light from early galaxies is thought to have ionized gas in the intergalactic medium. However, there are few observational constraints on this epoch because of the faintness of those galaxies and the redshift of their optical…
The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) will gather unprecedented spectro-photometric data on galaxies out to the highest redshifts. It is therefore crucial to identify the spectro-photometric diagnostics within reach of NGST, which will…