The transition from population III to population II-I star formation

By Umberto De Maio, Benedetta Ciardi, Klaus Dolag, Luca Tornatore, S. Khochfar. 2010

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results from the first cosmological simulations which study the onset of primordial, metal-free (population III), cosmic star formation and the transition to the present-day, metalrich star formation (population II-I), including molecular (H2, HD, etc.) evolution, tracing the injection of metals by supernovae (SNe) into the surrounding intergalactic medium and following the change in the initial mass function (IMF) according to the metallicity of the corresponding stellar population. Our investigation addresses the role of a wide variety of parameters (critical metallicity for the transition, IMF slope and range, SN/pair-instability SN metal yields, star formation threshold, resolution, etc.) on the metal-enrichment history and the associated transition in the star formation mode. All simulations present common trends. Metal enrichment is very patchy, with rare, unpolluted regions surviving at all redshifts, inducing the simultaneous presence of metal-free and metal-rich star formation regimes. As a result of the rapid pollution within high-density regions due to the first SN/pair-instability SN, local metallicity is quickly boosted above the critical metallicity for the transition. For this reason, population III stars dominate only during the very first stages of structure formation, with an average contribution to the total star formation rate that reaches a constant value of ∼10 −3 at redshift ∼11–13. If primordial supenovae consisted only of type II ones, the contribution would be ∼10 −1 . Interestingly, the above conclusions are independent from many poorly constrained

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/913527f1af2ac220c62d70123228713f827bc189

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Citations in the corpus

A case study of hurdle and generalized additive models in astronomy: the escape of ionizing radiation (2018, background): “The early generations of stars (Schneider et al. 2002; Maio et al. 2010; De Souza et al. 2013; Schauer et al. 2015) are likely among the major players of this transformation, which thus strongly depends on the (poorly known) high-z stellar properties.”
The birth of a galaxy – III. Propelling reionization with the faintest galaxies (2014, background): “In addition, some are directly affected by radiative and SN feedback from Pop III stars (Johnson & Bromm 2006; Wise & Abel 2008b; Greif et al. 2010; Maio et al. 2010; Wise et al. 2012b; Muratov et al. 2013; Pawlik, Milosavljević & Bromm 2013).”
Production of dust by massive stars at high redshift (2011, background): “This transition is expected to take place fast due to a rapid metal enrichment (Maio et al, 2010), although metal-free regions survive over longer timescales.”
THE BIRTH OF A GALAXY: PRIMORDIAL METAL ENRICHMENT AND STELLAR POPULATIONS (2010, methodology): “…al. 2007; Komiya et al. 2010), (iii) post-processing of cosmological simulations with blastwave models (Karlsson et al. 2008; Trenti et al. 2009; Trenti & Shull 2010), and (iv) direct numerical simulations with stellar feedback (Tornatore et al. 2007; Ricotti et al. 2008; Maio et al. 2010, 2011).”
The UV continua and inferred stellar populations of galaxies at z ~7-9 revealed by the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field 2012 campaign (2012, background): “Interested readers are referred to Maio et al. (2007, 2009, 2010) and Campisi et al. (2011) for complete details of the simulation, but the key details can be summarized as follows.”
Conditions for Reionizing the Universe with a Low Galaxy Ionizing Photon Escape Fraction (2019, background): “…metals, gas can cool inefficiently via molecular hydrogen cooling, which is believed to be the dominant cooling mechanism for the first generation of Population III stars forming at z=15–30 (e.g., Yoshida et al. 2004; Maio et al. 2010; Johnson et al. 2013; Wise et al. 2014; Jaacks et al. 2018c).”
Ubiquitous seeding of supermassive black holes by direct collapse (2012, methodology): “The metals ejected from the first Pop III star would be enough to pollute the gas and Pop II stars could form subsequently in the same halo (e.g. Maio et al. 2010).”
The First Billion Years project: the escape fraction of ionizing photons in the epoch of reionization (2015, background): “The critical metallicity at which the transition in the IMF takes place is uncertain, but cosmological simulations suggest that results do not depend sensitively on this choice (Maio et al. 2010, 2011).”