Cosmic Renaissance: The First Sources of Light

Abstract

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 the collapse and fragmentation of primordial gas indicate that the first stars formed at redshifts z ~ 20 - 30, and that they were predominantly very massive, with M_* > 100 M_sun. Important uncertainties, however, remain. Paramount among them is the accretion process, which builds up the final stellar mass by incorporating part of the diffuse, dust-free envelope into the central protostellar core. The first quasars, on the other hand, are predicted to have formed later on, at z ~ 10, in more massive dark matter halos, with total masses, ~ 10^8 M_sun, characteristic of dwarf galaxies.

16 pages, 7 figures, invited review, to appear in PASP, Feb. 2004

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• Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) First Year Observations: TE Polarization
• Formation of the First Supermassive Black Holes
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• The Physics of Star Formation
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Cited by in corpus (18)

• 2XMM Ultraluminous X-Ray Source Candidates in Nearby Galaxies
• The star-forming environment of a ULX in NGC 4559: an optical study
• A Galaxy at z = 6.545 and Constraints on the Epoch of Reionization
• Cosmic Star Formation, Reionization, and Constraints on Global Chemical Evolution
• High resolution studies of massive primordial haloes
• Gravitational Waves from the First Stars
• Hierarchical Growth and Cosmic Star Formation: Enrichment, Outflows and Supernova Rates
• The formation of massive Pop III stars in the presence of turbulence
• uvby-βphotometry of high-velocity and metal-poor stars XI. Ages of halo and old disk stars
• The Impact of Lyman alpha Trapping on the Formation of Primordial Objects
• Disk fragmentation and the formation of population III stars
• Comparing Spectral Models for ULXs with NGC 4517 ULX1
• Neutrino Signatures from the First Stars
• The G-dwarf problem in the Galaxy
• Cosmic Chemical Evolution with an Early Population of Intermediate Mass Stars
• Correlation of supernova redshifts with temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Metal Enrichment and Reionization Constraints on Early Star Formation
• Holography, large scale structure, supermassive black holes, and minimum stellar mass