Related papers: Critical Metallicities for Second-Generation Stars
The collapse of dense cores with different metallicities is studied by hydrodynamical calculations coupled with detailed chemical and radiative processes. For this purpose, we construct a simple chemical network with non-equilibrium…
The first stars are assumed to be predominantly massive. Although, due to the low initial abundances of heavy elements the line-driven stellar winds are supposed to be inefficient in the first stars, these stars may loose a significant…
The first stars in the universe, termed Population III, are thought to have been very massive compared to the stars that form in the present epoch. As feedback from the first generation of stars altered the contents of the interstellar…
We study the H2 photodissociation regions around OB stars in primordial gas clouds whose virial temperatures are between a few hundred and a few thousand Kelvin. In such small objects, a single O star can photodissociate a mass equal to…
The theory for the formation of the first population of stars (Pop III) predicts a IMF composed predominantly of high-mass stars, in contrast to the present-day IMF, which tends to yield stars with masses less than 1 M_Solar. The leading…
The formation of the first generations of stars at redshifts z > 15-20 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the universe to one of increasing complexity. We here review recent progress in understanding the assembly…
HD dominates the cooling of primordial clouds with enhanced ionization, e.g. shock-heated clouds in structure formation or supernova remnants, relic HII regions of Pop III stars, and clouds with cosmic-ray (CR) irradiation. There, the…
We model gas cooling in high-resolution N-body simulations in order to investigate the formation of the first generation of stars. We follow a region of a LCDM universe especially selected to contain a rich cluster by the present day. The…
If star formation proceeds by thermal fragmentation and the subsequent gravitational collapse of the individual fragments, how is it possible to form fragments massive enough for O and B stars in a typical star-forming molecular cloud where…
We investigate the impact of dust-induced gas fragmentation on the formation of the first low-mass, metal-poor stars (< 1Msun) in the early universe. Previous work has shown the existence of a critical dust-to-gas ratio, below which dust…
The thermal and chemical evolution of star-forming clouds is studied for different gas metallicities, Z, using the model of Omukai (2000), updated to include deuterium chemistry and the effects of cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We report results from numerical simulations of star formation in the early universe that focus on gas at very high densities and very low metallicities. We argue that the gas in the central regions of protogalactic halos will fragment as…
We describe how star formation is expected to proceed in the early metal-free Universe, focusing on the very first generations of stars. We then discuss how the star formation process may change as the effects of metallicity, external…
The first generation of protogalaxies likely formed out of primordial gas via H2-cooling in cosmological minihalos with virial temperatures of a few 1000K. However, their abundance is likely to have been severely limited by feedback…
The initial mass function (IMF) of metal-free stars that form in the initial starburst of massive (virial temperatures >10^4K) metal-free protogalaxies is studied. In particular, we focus on the effect of H2 photodissociation by…
We investigate the possibility of very early formation of primordial star clusters from high-\sigma perturbations in cold dark matter dominated structure formation scenarios. For this we have developed a powerful 2-level hierarchical…
We investigate the impact of an early population of massive stars on their surroundings. Dissociation of molecular hydrogen by strong UV emission from such stars is expected to produce a global transition in the cooling mechanism of…
The initial mass function (IMF) of the first (Population III) stars and Population II (Pop II) stars is poorly known due to a lack of observations of the period between recombination and reionization. In simulations of the formation of the…
The discovery of a low-mass star with such low metallicity as < 4.5x10^{-5} Z_sun reveals the critical role of dust in the formation of extremely metal-poor stars. In this paper we explore the effect of the growth of dust grains through…
We use numerical simulations to investigate the importance of HD formation and cooling on the first generation of metal-free stars in a LCDM cosmology. We have implemented and tested non-equilibrium HD chemistry in an adaptive mesh…