Massimo Ricotti
Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland
The First Billion Years of Galaxy Formation and Evolution in Light of JWST and Near-Field Cosmology
I will summarize recent theoretical work by our group aimed at understanding star and galaxy formation during the first billion years in the life of our Universe. This research is guided by radiation-hydrodynamic cosmological simulations of Population III stars, star clusters and galaxies forming at high redshifts. This field of study is now especially interesting in light of recent Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations that -- aided by the magnifying power of gravitational lenses -- have imaged, at parsec-scale resolution, individual young star clusters (or even individual stars) in galaxies at redshifts z > 6.