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Register a new userWhere are the Low-Mass Population III Stars ?
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We study the number and the distribution of low mass Pop III stars in the Milky Way. In our numerical model, hierarchical formation of dark matter minihalos and Milky Way sized halos are followed by a high resolution cosmological simulation. We model the Pop III formation in H2 cooling minihalos without metal under UV radiation of the Lyman-Werner bands. Assuming a Kroupa IMF from 0.15 to 1.0 Msun for low mass Pop III stars, as a working hypothesis, we try to constrain the theoretical models in reverse by current and future observations. We find that the survivors tend to concentrate on the center of halo and subhalos. We also evaluate the observability of Pop III survivors in the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies, and constraints on the number of Pop III survivors per minihalo. The higher latitude fields require lower sample sizes because of the high number density of stars in the galactic disk, the required sample sizes are comparable in the high and middle latitude fields by photometrically selecting low metallicity stars with optimized narrow band filters, and the required number of dwarf galaxies to find one Pop III survivor is less than ten at <100 kpc for the tip of redgiant stars. Provided that available observations have not detected any survivors, the formation models of low mass Pop III stars with more than ten stars per minihalo are already excluded. Furthermore, we discuss the way to constrain the IMF of Pop III star at a high mass range of > 10 Msun.
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We present the evolutionary models of metal-free stars in the mass range from 0.8 to 1.2 Msun with up-to-date input physics. The evolution is followed to the onset of hydrogen mixing into a convection, driven by the helium flash at red giant or asymptotic giant branch phase. The models of mass M >= 0.9 Msun undergo the central hydrogen flash, triggered by the carbon production due to the 3-alpha reactions. We find that the border of the off-center and central ignition of helium core flash falls between 1.1 and 1.2 Msun; the models of mass M <= 1.1 Msun experience the hydrogen mixing at the tip of red giant branch while the models of M = 1.2 Msun during the helium shell flashes on the asymptotic giant branch. The equation of state for the Coulomb liquid region, where electron conduction and radiation compete, is shown to be important since it affects the thermal state in the helium core and influences the red giant branch evolution. It is also found that the non-resonant term of 3-alpha reactios plays an important role, although it has negligible effect in the evolution of stars of younger populations. We compare our models with the computations by several other sets of authors, to confirm the good agreement except for one study which finds the helium ignition much closer to the center with consequences important for subsequent evolution.
To date, all of the reported high velocity stars (HVSs), which are believed to be ejected from the Galactic center, are blue and therefore almost certainly young. Old-population HVSs could be much more numerous than the young ones that have been discovered, but still have escaped detection because they are hidden in a much denser background of Galactic halo stars. Discovery of these stars would shed light on star formation at the Galactic center, the mechanism by which they are ejected from it, and, if they prove numerous, enable detailed studies of the structure of the dark halo. We analyze the problem of finding these stars and show that the search should be concentrated around the main-sequence turnoff (0.3<g-i<1.1) at relatively faint magnitudes (19.5<g<21.5). If the ratio of turnoff stars to B stars is the same for HVSs as it is in the local disk, such a search would yield about 1 old-population HVS per 10 deg^2. A telescope similar to the Sloan 2.5m could search about 20 deg^2 per night, implying that in short order such a population, should it exist, would show up in interesting numbers.
Extremely metal-poor stars are uniquely informative on the nature of massive Population III stars. Modulo a few elements that vary with stellar evolution, the present-day photospheric abundances observed in extremely metal-poor stars are representative of their natal gas cloud composition. For this reason, the chemistry of extremely metal-poor stars closely reflects the nucleosynthetic yields of supernovae from massive Population III stars. Here we collate detailed abundances of 53 extremely metal-poor stars from the literature and infer the masses of their Population III progenitors. We fit a simple initial mass function to a subset of 29 of theinferred Population III star masses, and find that the mass distribution is well-represented by a power law IMF with exponent $alpha = 2.35^{+0.29}_{-0.24}$. The inferred maximum progenitor mass for supernovae from massive Population III stars is $M_{rm{max}} = 87^{+13}_{-33}$ M$_odot$, and we find no evidence in our sample for a contribution from stars with masses above $sim$120 M$_odot$. The minimum mass is strongly consistent with the theoretical lower mass limit for Population III supernovae. We conclude that the IMF for massive Population III stars is consistent with the initial mass function of present-day massive stars and there may well have formed stars much below the supernova mass limit that could have survived to the present day.
It is uncertain whether or not low-mass Population III stars ever existed. While limits on the number density of Population III stars with $M_{ast} approx 0.8~M_{odot}$ have been derived using Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data, little is known about the occurrence of Population III stars at lower masses. In the absence of reliable parallaxes, the spectra of metal-poor main sequence (MPMS) stars with $M_{ast} lesssim 0.8~M_{odot}$ can easily be confused with cool white dwarfs. To resolve this ambiguity, we present a classifier that differentiates between MPMS stars and white dwarfs based on photometry and/or spectroscopy without the use of parallax information. We build and train our classifier using state-of-the-art theoretical spectra and evaluate it on existing SDSS-based classifications for objects with reliable Gaia DR2 parallaxes. We then apply our classifier to a large catalog of objects with SDSS photometry and spectroscopy to search for MPMS candidates. We discover several previously unknown candidate extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars and recover numerous confirmed EMP stars already in the literature. We conclude that archival SDSS spectroscopy has already been exhaustively searched for EMP stars. We predict that the lowest-mass primordial-composition stars will have redder optical-to-infrared colors than cool white dwarfs at constant effective temperature due to surface gravity-dependent collision-induced absorption from molecular hydrogen. We suggest that the application of our classifier to data produced by next-generation spectroscopic surveys will set stronger constraints on the number density of low-mass Population III stars in the Milky Way.
Observational evidence has been mounting for the existence of intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs, 10^2-10^5 Msun), but observing them at all, much less constraining their masses, is very challenging. In one theorized formation channel, IMBHs are the seeds for supermassive black holes in the early universe. As a result, IMBHs are predicted to exist in the local universe in dwarf galaxies, as well as wandering in more massive galaxy halos. However, these environments are not conducive to the accretion events or dynamical signatures that allow us to detect IMBHs. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will demystify IMBHs by detecting the mergers of these objects out to extremely high redshifts, while measuring their masses with extremely high precision. These observations of merging IMBHs will allow us to constrain the formation mechanism and subsequent evolution of massive black holes, from the dark ages to the present day, and reveal the role that IMBHs play in hierarchical galaxy evolution.
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