Related papers: The first stars: Where did they form?
We have implemented a simple model to identify the likely sites of the first stars and galaxies in the high-resolution simulations of the formation of galactic dark matter halos of the Aquarius Project. The first star in a galaxy like the…
We use high-resolution simulations to show that the current standard paradigm for the growth of structure in the Universe predicts the formation of a galaxy like our own to differ substantially from the classic ELS and Searle/Zinn pictures.…
The first stars are believed to have formed a few hundred million years after the big bang in so-called dark matter minihalos with masses ~10^6 M_sun. Their radiation lit up the Universe for the first time, and the supernova explosions that…
The first stars are predicted to have formed within 200 million years after the Big Bang, initiating the cosmic dawn. A true first star has not yet been discovered, although stars with tiny amounts of elements heavier than helium ('metals')…
How and when did the first generation of stars form at the end of the cosmic dark ages? Quite generically, within variants of the cold dark matter model of cosmological structure formation, the first sources of light are expected to form in…
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…
Metal-poor stars in the Milky Way are local relics of the epoch of the first stars and the first galaxies. However, a low metallicity does not prove that a star formed in this ancient era, as metal-poor stars form over a range of redshift…
This paper presents theoretical star formation and chemical enrichment histories for the stellar halo of the Milky Way based on new chemodynamical modeling. The goal of this study is to assess the extent to which metal-poor stars in the…
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…
The oldest stars in the Milky Way (MW) bear imprints of the Galaxy's early assembly history. We use FIRE cosmological zoom-in simulations of three MW-mass disk galaxies to study the spatial distribution, chemistry, and kinematics of the…
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…
The formation of the first generations of stars at redshifts z > 15-20 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the universe to one of increasing complexity. We here review recent progress in understanding the assembly…
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…
Quantification of the Galaxy's star formation history involves both the duration and the rate of formation, with these parameters being known with different precision for different populations. The early rate of star formation is knowable…
We study the spatial distribution of Galactic metal-free stars by combining an extremely high-resolution (7.8 X 10^5 solar masses per particle) Cold Dark Matter N-body simulation of the Milky-Way with a semi-analytic model of metal…
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 formation of our Milky Way can be parsed qualitatively into different phases that resulted in its structurally different stellar populations: the halo and the disk components. Revealing a quantitative overall picture of the Galactic…
Population III (or Pop. III) stars, the first stellar generation built up from metal-free primordial gas, first started to form at redshifts z ~ 30. They formed primarily in small dark matter halos with masses of a few million solar masses.…
We review our current understanding of how the first galaxies formed at the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few 100 million years after the Big Bang. Modern large telescopes discovered galaxies at redshifts greater than seven, whereas…
The very first stars likely formed from metal-free, molecular hydrogen-cooled gas at the centers of dark matter minihalos. Prior to nuclear fusion, these stars may have been supported by dark matter heating from annihilations in the star,…