THE BIRTH OF A GALAXY: PRIMORDIAL METAL ENRICHMENT AND STELLAR POPULATIONS

By John H. Wise, Matthew J. Turk, M. Norman, Tom Abel. 2010

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By definition, Population III stars are metal-free, and their protostellar collapse is driven by molecular hydrogen cooling in the gas phase, leading to large characteristic masses. Population II stars with lower characteristic masses form when the star-forming gas reaches a critical metallicity of 10−6–10−3.5 Z☉. We present an adaptive mesh refinement radiation hydrodynamics simulation that follows the transition from Population III to Population II star formation. The maximum spatial resolution of 1 comoving parsec allows for individual molecular clouds to be well resolved and their stellar associations to be studied in detail. We model stellar radiative feedback with adaptive ray tracing. A top-heavy initial mass function for the Population III stars is considered, resulting in a plausible distribution of pair-instability supernovae and associated metal enrichment. We find that the gas fraction recovers from 5% to nearly the cosmic fraction in halos with merger histories rich in halos above 107 M☉. A single pair-instability supernova is sufficient to enrich the host halo to a metallicity floor of 10−3 Z☉ and to transition to Population II star formation. This provides a natural explanation for the observed floor on damped Lyα systems metallicities reported in the literature, which is of this order. We find that stellar metallicities do not necessarily trace stellar ages, as mergers of halos with established stellar populations can create superpositions of t−Z evolutionary tracks. A bimodal metallicity distribution is created after a starburst occurs when the halo can cool efficiently through atomic line cooling.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ac1e8e6d4ce30add1372d5cc80404137d508994

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Citations in the corpus

Building up the Population III initial mass function from cosmological initial conditions (2016, background): “…same massive Pop III stars also left behind the first metal-enriched SN remnants (e.g. Mori et al. 2002; Bromm et al. 2003; Wada & Venkatesan 2003; Norman et al. 2004; Tornatore et al. 2007; Greif et al. 2007, 2010; Wise et al. 2012; Maio et al. 2011; recently reviewed in Karlsson et al. 2013).”
Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds (2016, background): “…background temperature (TCMB) by dust and metal line cooling at z=15 even in the presence of UV flux (Tornatore et al. 2007; Smith et al. 2009; Greif et al. 2010; Wise et al. 2012; Whalen et al. 2013; Johnson et al. 2013a; Safranek-Shrader et al. 2014a; Bovino et al. 2014; Pallottini et al. 2014).”
The birth of a galaxy – II. The role of radiation pressure (2012, methodology): “Here we outline how we treat Pop II and III SF in our simulations; for more details and justifications, we refer the reader to Wise et al. (2012).”
CANDELS: THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE OBSERVED GALAXY POPULATION TO COSMIC REIONIZATION (2012, background): “We note that currently there is no strong evidence to support such very low metallicities of these galaxies (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2010; Finkelstein et al. 2010, 2011; Wilkins et al. 2011b; Finlator et al. 2011; Wise et al. 2012).”
The First Billion Years project: the impact of stellar radiation on the co-evolution of Populations II and III (2012, background): “…SFR is the increased minimum halo mass required for star formation in a halo subjected to LW radiation (e.g. Machacek et al. 2001; O’Shea & Norman 2008), which results in star formation taking place in larger haloes in the simulation with LW feedback (see also Hummel et al. 2011; Wise et al. 2012).”
REPRODUCING THE STELLAR MASS/HALO MASS RELATION IN SIMULATED ΛCDM GALAXIES: THEORY VERSUS OBSERVATIONAL ESTIMATES (2012, methodology): “…of SN energy into the ISM, and the modeling of recurring SN by the Sedov solution, should be interpreted as a scheme to model the effect of energy deposited in the local ISM by all processes related to young stars, including UV radiation from massive stars (Hopkins et al. 2011; Wise et al. 2012).”
Evolution of the atomic and molecular gas content of galaxies (2013, unknown): “This gas can then form “Pop III” stars which can enrich the surrounding ISM to ZIII ∼ 10−3 Z⊙ (Schneider et al. 2002; Greif et al. 2010; Wise et al. 2012).”
Near-Field Cosmology with Extremely Metal-Poor Stars (2015, background): “Metal mixing, however, occurs in a rather inhomogeneous fashion resulting in large abundance spreads of several dex across the system (Greif et al. 2010,Wise et al. 2012).”
METALLICITY EVOLUTION OF DAMPED Lyα SYSTEMS OUT TO z ∼ 5 (2012, background): “Moreover, we show the metallicity prediction from simulations of primordial metal enrichment as a black diamond (Wise et al. 2012), which would require a drop in metallicity below what is extrapolated from the data.”
THE QUENCHING OF THE ULTRA-FAINT DWARF GALAXIES IN THE REIONIZATION ERA (2014, background): “The spectroscopy demonstrates that these galaxies are comprised of extremely metal-poor stars; the lowest metallicities are consistent with pre-enrichment from a single supernova (see Wise et al. 2012).”
Star formation in semi-analytic galaxy formation models with multiphase gas (2015, unknown): “This gas can then form “Pop III” stars which can enrich the surrounding ISM to ZIII ∼ 10 −3 Z⊙ (Schneider et al. 2002; Greif et al. 2010; Wise et al. 2012).”
ALMA SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD: THE INFRARED EXCESS OF UV-SELECTED z = 2–10 GALAXIES AS A FUNCTION OF UV-CONTINUUM SLOPE AND STELLAR MASS (2016, methodology): “Our fixing the fiducial metallicity to 0.2 Z⊙ is well motivated based on studies of the metallicity of individual z ∼ 2-4 galaxies (Pettini et al. 2000) or as predicted from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (Finlator et al. 2011; Wise et al. 2012).”
Dark matter cores all the way down (2015, background): “…be very sensitive to the details of reionisation; epoch of gas infall; star formation; cooling physics; and ‘population III’ star formation/evolution that we do not properly resolve or model here (e.g. Efstathiou 1992; Ricotti et al. 2008; Johnson et al. 2009; Boley et al. 2009; Wise et al. 2012).”
GALAXY PROPERTIES AND UV ESCAPE FRACTIONS DURING THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION: RESULTS FROM THE RENAISSANCE SIMULATIONS (2016, methodology): “For the Rarepeak simulation, we use the time-dependent LW optically thin radiation background used in Wise et al. (2012b), which is based on the semi-analytical model of Wise & Abel (2005), updated with the seven-year WMAP parameters and optical depth to Thomson scattering.”