Related papers: Critical Metallicities for Second-Generation Stars
The influence of the first stars on the formation of second-generation objects at high redshift may be determined, in part, by their metal enrichment of surrounding gas. At a critical metallicity, Zcrit, primordial gas cools more…
The formation of the first stars out of metal-free gas appears to result in stars at least an order of magnitude more massive than in the present-day case. We here consider what controls the transition from a primordial to a modern initial…
To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark…
We study the influence of low levels of metal enrichment on the cooling and collapse of ionized gas in small protogalactic halos using three-dimensional, smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. Our initial conditions represent…
In cold dark matter cosmological models, the first stars to form are believed to do so within small protogalaxies. We wish to understand how the evolution of these early protogalaxies changes once the gas forming them has been enriched with…
Within collapsing protogalaxies, thermal instability leads to the formation of a population of cool fragments which are confined by the pressure of a residual hot background medium. The critical mass required for the cold clouds to become…
We investigate the condition for the formation of low-mass second-generation stars in the early universe. It has been proposed that gas cooling by dust thermal emission can trigger fragmentation of a low-metallicity star-forming gas cloud.…
Population III stars are believed to have been more massive than typical stars today and to have formed in relative isolation. The thermodynamic impact of metals is expected to induce a transition leading to clustered, low-mass Population…
This paper systematically studies the relation between metallicity and mass loss of massive stars. We perform one-dimensional stellar evolution simulations and build a grid of $\sim$2000 models with initial masses ranging between 11 and 60…
Primordial star formation appears to result in stars at least an order of magnitude more massive than modern star formation. It has been proposed that the transition from primordial to modern initial mass functions occurs due to the onset…
Recent theoretical investigations have suggested that the formation of the very first stars, forming out of metal-free gas, was fundamentally different from the present-day case. In this paper, we study the effect of metallicity on the…
If a significant fraction of metals is in dust, star-forming cores with metallicity higher than a critical value ~10^{-6}-10^{-5}Z_sun are able to fragment by dust cooling, thereby producing low-mass cores. Despite being above the critical…
We present stellar structure and atmosphere models of metal-free stars and examine them from a cosmological point of view. Metal-free stars exhibit high effective temperatures and small sizes relative to metal-enriched stars of equal mass.…
The theory for the formation of the first population of stars (Pop III) predicts an initial mass function (IMF) dominated by high-mass stars, in contrast to the present-day IMF, which tends to yield mostly stars with masses less than 1…
We explore the minimal conditions which enable the formation of metal-enriched solar and sub-solar mass stars. We find that in the absence of dust grains, gas fragmentation occurs at densities nH ~ [10^4-10^5]cm^{-3} when the metallicity…
We investigate the process of self-regulated star formation via photodissociation of hydrogen molecules in low metallicity clouds. We evaluate the influence region's scale of a massive star in low metallicity gas clouds whose temperatures…
Simulations of the formation of Population III (Pop III) stars suggest that they were much more massive than the Pop II and Pop I stars observed today. This is due to the collapse dynamics of metal-free gas, which is regulated by the…
This study investigates the physical origin of the critical metallicity required for the formation of cool supergiants, as revealed by stellar evolution models. Using grids of stellar models, we show that the terminal-age main-sequence…
Observations of molecular clouds in metal-poor environments typically find that they have much higher star formation rates than one would expect based on their observed CO luminosities and the molecular gas masses that are inferred from…
The thermal and fragmentation properties of star-forming clouds have important consequences on the corresponding characteristic stellar mass. The initial composition of the gas within these clouds is a record of the nucleosynthetic products…