The Infrared Glow of First Stars
Abstract
Kashlinsky et al. (2005) find a significant cosmic infrared background fluctuation excess on angular scales >50 arcsec that cannot be explained by instrumental noise or local foregrounds. The excess has been tentatively attributed to emission from primordial very massive (PopIII) stars formed <200 Myr after the Big Bang. Using an evolutionary model motivated by independent observations and including various feedback processes, we find that PopIII stars can contribute <40% of the total background intensity (\nu J_\nu ~ 1-2 nW m^-2 sr^-1 in the 0.8-8 \mum range) produced by all galaxies (hosting both PopIII and PopII stars) at z>5. The infrared fluctuation excess is instead very precisely accounted by the clustering signal of galaxies at z>5, predominantly hosting PopII stars with masses and properties similar to the present ones.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0512403,
title = {The Infrared Glow of First Stars},
author = {R. Salvaterra and M. Magliocchetti and A. Ferrara and R. Schneider},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0512403},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures, MNRAS in press