Early galaxy formation and its large-scale effects

TL;DR

This paper reviews early galaxy formation, integrating theoretical models and recent observations to understand how initial structures influenced cosmic reionization and metal enrichment of the universe.

Contribution

It synthesizes various models and observations to provide a comprehensive picture of early galaxy formation and its large-scale effects.

Findings

Early galaxies contributed significantly to cosmic reionization.

Primordial fluctuations played a key role in galaxy emergence.

Early structures impacted metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium.

Abstract

Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of additional physical processes must be understood and implemented in theoretical models before these can be reliably used to interpret observations. In parallel, the astonishing recent progresses made in detecting galaxies that formed only a few hundreds of million years after the Big Bang is pushing the quest for more sophisticated and detailed studies of early structures. In this review, we combine the information gleaned from different theoretical models/studies to build a coherent picture of the Universe in its early stages which includes the physics of galaxy formation along with the impact that early structures had on large-scale processes as cosmic reionization and metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium.