Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger
| First 5 Authors: Oliver Zier, Rahul Kannan, Aaron Smith, Ewald Puchwein, Mark Vogelsberger
| Summary:
Population III (Pop III) stars are the first stars in the Universe, forming
from pristine, metal-free gas and marking the end of the cosmic dark ages.
Their formation rate is expected to sharply decline after redshift $z approx
15$ due to metal enrichment from previous generations of stars. In this paper,
we analyze 14 zoom-in simulations from the THESAN-ZOOM project, which evolves
different haloes from the THESAN-1 cosmological box down to redshift $z=3$. The
high mass resolution of up to $142 M_odot$ per cell in the gas phase combined
with a multiphase model of the interstellar medium (ISM), radiative transfer
including Lyman-Werner radiation, dust physics, and a non-equilibrium chemistry
network that tracks molecular hydrogen, allows for a realistic but still
approximate description of Pop III star formation in pristine gas. Our results
show that Pop III stars continue to form in low-mass haloes ranging from $10^6
M_odot$ to $10^9 M_odot$ until the end of reionization at around $z=5$. At
this stage, photoevaporation suppresses further star formation in these
minihaloes, which subsequently merge into larger central haloes. Hence, the
remnants of Pop III stars primarily reside in the satellite galaxies of larger
haloes at lower redshifts. While direct detection of Pop III stars remains
elusive, these results hint that lingering primordial star formation could
leave observable imprints or indirectly affect the properties of high-redshift
galaxies. Explicit Pop III feedback and specialized initial mass function
modelling within the THESAN-ZOOM framework would further help interpreting
emerging constraints from the James Webb Space Telescope.
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