Related papers: The first stars: Where did they form?
The chemical composition of the most metal-deficient stars reflects the composition of the gas from which they formed. These old stars provide crucial clues to the star formation history and the synthesis of chemical elements in the early…
Stars form from cold molecular interstellar gas. Since this is relatively rare in the local Universe, galaxies like the Milky Way form only a few new stars per year. Typical massive galaxies in the distant Universe formed stars an order of…
The nucleosynthesis in the first massive stars may be constrained by observing the surface composition of long-lived very iron-poor stars born around 10 billion years ago from material enriched by their ejecta. Many interesting clues on…
The first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the universe may be Dark Stars, powered by dark matter heating rather than by fusion. Weakly interacting massive particles, which are their own antiparticles, can annihilate and provide…
The Galactic bulge of the Milky Way is made up of stars with a broad range of metallicity, -3.0 < [Fe/H] < 1 dex. The mean of the Metallicity Distribution Function (MDF) decreases as a function of height z from the plane and, more weakly,…
Dark and baryonic matter moved at different velocities in the early Universe, which strongly suppressed star formation in some regions. This was estimated to imprint a large-scale fluctuation signal of about 2 mK in the 21-cm spectral line…
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…
We develop a detailed model of the Milky Way (a ``prototypical'' disk galaxy) and extend it to other disks with the help of some simple scaling relations, obtained in the framework of Cold Dark Matter models. This phenomenological…
We apply the phenomenological model used to explain the abundances of Fe and r-process elements in very metal-poor stars in the Galaxy to [Fe/H] of damped Ly alpha systems. It is assumed that the first stars formed after the Big Bang were…
We explore the predictions of the standard hierarchical clustering scenario of galaxy formation, regarding the numbers and metallicities of PopIII stars likely to be found within our Galaxy today. By PopIII we shall be referring to stars…
Galaxies with the mass of the Milky Way dominate the stellar mass density of the Universe but it is uncertain how and when they were assembled. Here we study progenitors of these galaxies out to z=2.5, using data from the 3D-HST and CANDELS…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…
The Milky Way serves as a template for understanding the formation and evolution of late-type massive disk galaxies since we can obtain detailed chemical and kinematic information for large samples of individual stars. However, the early…
As the Universe emerged from its initial hot and dense phase, its chemical composition was extremely simple, being limited to stable H and He isotopes, and traces of Li. The first stars that formed had such initial composition. However,…
Early-type galaxies are not the simple Population II systems they have long been assumed to be. While upwards of 80% of the stellar mass of early-type galaxies likely formed at high redshift, small frostings of intermediate-age stellar…
Whether among the myriad tiny proto-galaxies there exists a population with similarities to present day galaxies is an open question. We show, using BlueTides, the first hydrodynamic simulation large enough to resolve the relevant scales,…
In some scenarios for the formation of the Milky Way bulge the stellar population at the edges of the boxy bulge may be younger than those on the minor axis, or close to the Galactic center. So far the only bulge region where deep…
Scaling from the empirical metal yield as measured in clusters of galaxies, it is inferred that early in the evolution of the Galaxy the bulge stellar population has produced $\sim 10^9\msun$ of metals, at least 5 times more than the total…
The development of primordial inhomogeneities into the non-linear regime and the formation of the first astrophysical objects within dark matter halos mark the transition from a simple, neutral, cooling universe -- described by just a few…