Thanks to JWST, we are now in an era where observing campaigns to discover Population III stars has become a possibility. Over the past 3 years, multiple JWST proposals on Pop III stars have secured time, but no definitive detections have emerged. The two most pertinent challenges are: 1.) if most Pop III stars were massive, they would have not survived for a time window long enough for JWST...
The era of cosmic dawn began with the first stars that formed in the Universe a mere 200 - 300 million years after the Big Bang. These stars produced the first supernovae and black holes, enriched the interstellar medium (ISM) with metals, were the building blocks of the first galaxies, and significantly contributed to cosmic reionization. However, compared to star formation and feedback in...
Dust plays a fundamental role in shaping the formation and evolution of galaxies, regulating star formation through absorption and scattering of stellar light. The dust attenuation curve provides key insights into dust properties and their connection to the interstellar medium (ISM), yet its characteristics in the early Universe remain poorly constrained.
Using JWST/NIRSpec spectroscopy, we...
One of the fundamental astronomical discoveries just a century ago, was that the Milky Way is one of a vast number of "islands" within the cosmic sea. One of the great challenges of this century is to understand why they are neither isolated nor monolithic. The pollution of the gaseous, baryonic component by stellar nucleosynthesis is the unique evidence remaining over cosmic time to trace...
Molecular hydrogen (H2 ) plays a crucial role in the formation and evolution of galaxies, serving as the primary fuel reservoir
for star formation. In a metal-enriched Universe, H2 forms mostly through catalysis on interstellar dust grain surfaces. However, due
to the complexities of modelling this process, star formation in cosmological simulations often relies on empirical or...
We investigate if Local Group dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies might have formed the first planetary systems able to support life. By exploiting the observed chemical abundances and star formation histories, we developed a novel semi-empirical model which quantifies the probability of dSphs to host life-friendly planets by investigating if their stars: (i) reach the minimum heavy elements...
