Title : Low-metallicity Star Formation

From the first stars to dwarf galaxies

Author :Leslie K.Hunt , Suzanne C. Madden , Rafaella Schneider

Published in January 2009 by CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Address : The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Telephone : 01223 312393 Fax : 01223 315052

Internet : www.cambridge.org

ISBN : 978-0-521-88986-5 - 414 pages – hardback

PRICE : £68.00 $ 135.00

Although low-mass metal-poor galaxies in the local universe have often been proposed as the "primordial building blocks" in the hierarchical scenario of structure formation, several lines of evidence suggest that this may not be true. These apparent contradictions can be better debated by bringing together astronomers from heterogeneous fields including stellar populations and population synthesis, stellar evolution and the end-products of star formation, the physics and dynamics of the interstellar medium, and chemical evolution.

Combining theory of metal-poor and primordial star formation with low- and high-redshift observations over a wide range of wavelengths from the X-ray to the radio will allow us to assess the viability of using local dwarf galaxies as high-redshift analogues.

We aim to foster an open exchange among different astronomical communities by placing in juxtaposition, for the first time, low-redshift observational astronomers and observational cosmologists, as well as observers and theoreticians.