The Destruction of Cosmological Minihalos by Primordial Supernovae

By D. Whalen, B. van Veelen, Brian W. O'Shea, M. Norman. 2008

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present numerical simulations of primordial supernovae in cosmological minihalos at z ∼ 20. We consider Type II supernovae, hypernovae, and pair instability supernovae (PISN) in halos from 6.9 × 105 to 1.2 × 107 M☉, those in which Population III stars are expected to form via H2 cooling. Our simulations are the first to follow the evolution of the blast from a free expansion on spatial scales of 10−4 pc until its approach to pressure equilibrium in the relic H II region of the progenitor, ~1000 pc. Supernovae in H II regions first expand adiabatically and then radiate strongly upon collision with baryons ejected from the halo during its photoevaporation by the progenitor. In contrast to previous findings, supernovae in neutral halos promptly emit most of their kinetic energy as X-rays, but retain enough momentum to seriously disrupt the halo. Explosions in H II regions escape into the IGM, but neutral halos confine the blast and its metals. In H II regions, a prompt second generation of stars may form in the remnant at radii of 100-200 pc. Explosions confined by massive halos instead recollapse, with infall rates in excess of 10−2 M☉ yr−1 that heavily contaminate their interior. This fallback may either fuel massive black hole growth at very high redshifts or create the first globular clusters with radii of 10-20 pc at the center of the halo. Our findings suggest that the first primitive galaxies may therefore have formed sooner, with greater numbers of stars and distinct chemical signatures, than in current models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1564869f330fba4323646e96c75166b0f7c06936

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Citations in the corpus

FORMATION RATES OF POPULATION III STARS AND CHEMICAL ENRICHMENT OF HALOS DURING THE REIONIZATION ERA (2009, background): “More typical explosions may instead enrich significantly less gas (≈ 106 M ) although at a correspondingly higher metallicity (see Bromm et al. 2003; Kitayama & Yoshida 2005; Greif et al. 2007; Whalen et al. 2008).”
Revealing the High-Redshift Star Formation Rate with Gamma-Ray Bursts (2008, background): “The effect of supernovae on the gas in high-z galaxies is an ongoing field of research (e.g., Whalen et al. 2008).”
The birth of a galaxy – II. The role of radiation pressure (2012, background): “They can self-enrich their environment (e.g. Wise et al. 2012), disrupt its starforming cloud (e.g. Draine & Woods 1991; Whalen et al. 2008), create realistic bulgeless disc galaxies, and possibly launch large-scale outflows (Governato et al. 2010; Brook et al. 2012).”
ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS DURING REIONIZATION: EFFECTS DUE TO SUPERNOVA FEEDBACK AND RUNAWAY OB STARS (2014, background): “We set the initial metallicity to 2×10−5, as primordial SNe can quickly enrich metals in mini-halos of mass 107M⊙ (e.g.,Whalen et al. 2008), which our simulations cannot resolve properly.”
The birth of a galaxy – III. Propelling reionization with the faintest galaxies (2014, background): “If Pop III star formation is delayed until haloes have M 107 M , the H II region and SN blast wave may fail to breakout of the halo, possibly leading to prompt metal-enriched star formation (Whalen et al. 2008; Ritter et al. 2012).”
Hyper-Eddington accretion flows on to massive black holes (2015, unknown): “…emitted along any line of sight will always equal the number of photo-ionizations in that direction over any time interval (Whalen & Norman 2006; Whalen et al. 2008) as ζi(r) = ∫ ∞ νi 4πĴν hν σi dν, (14) niΓi = ni ∫ ∞ νi 4πĴν hν σiEheat,i dν, (15) where Ĵν is the mean intensity which…”
THE BIRTH OF A GALAXY: PRIMORDIAL METAL ENRICHMENT AND STELLAR POPULATIONS (2010, background): “Massive Pop III stars would form again in this halo; however, enriching the surrounding IGM with Pop III SNe and ejecting material becomes more difficult in halos with M >∼ 10 7M⊙ (Whalen et al. 2008).”
Pathways to massive black holes and compact star clusters in pre-galactic dark matter haloes with virial temperatures ≳10 000 K (2008, background): “Especially for the first generation of these haloes it is thus very uncertain, how efficiently they have formed stars (e.g. Greif et al. 2008; Norman 2008; Whalen et al. 2008).”
The First Billion Years project: the impact of stellar radiation on the co-evolution of Populations II and III (2012, background): “…in the first Pop III star-forming haloes, likely makes our results lower limits for the efficiency of metal enrichment; as shown by e.g. Kitayama & Yoshida (2005) and Whalen et al. (2008), photoheating lowers the density of the ISM and allows SN ejecta to more readily escape into the IGM.”
GALAXY PROPERTIES AND UV ESCAPE FRACTIONS DURING THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION: RESULTS FROM THE RENAISSANCE SIMULATIONS (2016, background): “…stars, where H IIregions and supernovae (SNe) can drive outflows larger than the escape velocity of their host halo (Kitayama et al. 2004; Whalen et al. 2004, 2008; Kitayama & Yoshida 2005; Abel et al. 2007), leaving behind a gas-poor halo that only recovers by cosmological accretion…”
THE MASS SPECTRUM OF THE FIRST STARS (2014, background): “The supernova explosions are so energetic that the ejecta is not confined in the minihalos (Kitayama & Yoshida 2005; Whalen et al. 2008), but the explosions themselves could 10 Non-LTE effects are taken into account as described in Tominaga et al. (2014).”