Population III stars, the first generation of stars formed from primordial Big Bang material with a top-heavy IMF, should contribute substantially to the Universe reionization and they are crucial for understanding the early metal enrichment of galaxies. Therefore it is very important that these objects, foreseen by theories, are detected by observations. However PopIII stars, searched through the HeII 1640A line signature, have remained elusive. We report about the search for the HeII line in a galaxy at z=6.5, which is a very promising candidate. Unfortunately we are not yet able to show the results of this search. However we call attention to the possible detection of PopIII stars in a lensed HII dwarf galaxy at z=3.4, which appeared in the literature some years ago, but has been overlooked.
@article{arxiv.0807.4634,
title = {The search for Population III stars},
author = {Sperello di Serego Alighieri and Jaron Kurk and Benedetta Ciardi and Andrea Cimatti and Emanuele Daddi and Andrea Ferrara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.4634},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Contribution for the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium No. 255 on "Low-Metallicity Star Formation: From the First Stars to Dwarf Galaxies"