Related papers: Detecting Primordial Stars
Nonrotating, zero metallicity stars with initial masses 140 < M < 260 solar masses are expected to end their lives as pair-production supernovae (PPSNe), in which an electron-positron pair-production instability triggers explosive nuclear…
The evolution and explosion of metal-free stars with masses 10--100 solar masses are followed, and their nucleosynthetic yields, light curves, and remnant masses determined. When the supernova yields are integrated over a Salpeter initial…
We report on a pilot study on identifying metal-poor stars pre-enriched by Pair-Instability Supernovae (PISNe). Very massive, first generation (Population III) stars (140M\odot \leq M \leq 260M\odot) end their lives as PISNe, which have…
I review the physical properties of pair-production supernovae (PPSNe) as well as the prospects for them to be constrained observationally. In very massive (140-260 solar mass) stars, much of the pressure support comes from the radiation…
While the modern stellar IMF shows a rapid decline with increasing mass, theoretical investigations suggest that very massive stars (>100 solar masses) may have been abundant in the early universe. Other calculations also indicate that,…
Renewed interest in the first stars that were formed in the universe has led to the discovery of extremely iron-poor stars. Since several competing scenarios exist, our understanding of the mass range that determines the observed elemental…
Gravitational lensing may render individual high-mass stars detectable out to cosmological distances, and several extremely magnified stars have in recent years been detected out to redshifts $z\approx 6$. Here, we present Muspelheim, a…
The chemical abundance patterns observed in metal-poor Galactic halo stars contain the signature of the first supernovae, and thus allows us to probe the first stars that formed in the universe. We construct a theoretical model for the…
The emergence of the first sources of light at redshifts of z ~ 10-30 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the Universe to one of increasing complexity. We review recent progress in our understanding of the formation of…
The most metal-poor stars found in the Galaxy and in nearby galaxies are witnesses of the early evolution of the Universe. In a general picture in which we expect the metallicity to increase monotonically with time, as a result of the metal…
Studying a range of old metal-poor stars provides information over cosmological timescales of our Galaxy. Such studies are indicative of the pristine gases and evolution of the Milky Way. Deriving stellar parameters and abundances from…
Supermassive stars have been proposed as the progenitors of the massive ($\sim 10^{9}\,\rm{M}_{\odot}$) quasars observed at $z\sim7$. Prospects for directly detecting supermassive stars with next-generation facilities depend critically on…
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements…
We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the detectability of the first stars and their enrichment signatures in galaxy clusters. We show that the mean metallicity of outflows from objects containing these Population III (PopIII) stars…
Recent evidence on the metal content of the high-redshift Lyman alpha forest seen in quasar spectra suggests that an early generation of galaxies enriched the intergalactic medium (IGM) at z ~ 5. We calculate the number of supernovae that…
We argue that extreme metal-poor stars show a high dispersion in metallicity, because their abundances are the outcome of very few supernova events. Abundance anomalies should appear because of the discrete range of progenitor masses. There…
Our current understanding of the chemical evolution of the Universe is that a first generation of stars was formed out of primordial material, completely devoid of metals (Pop III stars). This first population of stars comprised massive…
The existence of galaxies with no heavy elements is a key prediction of cosmological models. So far no "zero-metallicity", or Population III, galaxies have been identified. Here, we report the identification of an extremely metal-poor…
The first stars hold intrinsic interest for their uniqueness and for their potential importance to galaxy formation, chemical enrichment, and feedback on the intergalactic medium (IGM). The metal-free composition of the first stars…
The chemical abundances of large samples of extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars can be used to investigate metal-free stellar populations, supernovae, and nucleosynthesis as well as the formation and galactic chemical evolution of the Milky…