The Impact of Lyman alpha Trapping on the Formation of Primordial Objects

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution cosmological simulations to investigate how Lyman alpha photon trapping influences the formation and fragmentation of primordial gas clouds, highlighting its role in forming massive objects like black holes.

Contribution

It introduces an approximate method to include Lyman alpha radiative transfer effects in simulations, revealing its impact on primordial object formation and suppression of fragmentation.

Findings

Lyman alpha trapping prevents gas fragmentation, leading to massive object formation.

Gas temperature remains above 10^4 K in trapping cases, inhibiting stellar mass formation.

Molecular hydrogen cooling promotes fragmentation, unlike Lyman alpha trapping.

Abstract

Numerous cosmological simulations have been performed to study the formation of the first objects. We present the results of high resolution 3-D cosmological simulations of primordial objects formation using the adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH by including in an approximate manner the radiative transfer effects of Lyman alpha photons. We compare the results of a Lyman alpha trapping case inside gas clouds with atomic and molecular hydrogen cooling cases.The principal objective of this research is to follow the collapse of a zero metallicity halo with an effective equation of state (that accounts for the trapping) and to explore the fate of a halo in each of the three cases, specifically, the impact of thermodynamics on fragmentation of halos.Our results show that in the case of Lyman alpha trapping, fragmentation is halted and a massive object is formed at the center of a halo. The temperature of the gas remains well above $10^{4}$ K and the halo is not able to fragment to stellar masses. In the atomic cooling case, gas collapses into one or two massive clumps in contrast to the Lyman alpha trapping case. For the molecular hydrogen cooling case, gas cools efficiently and fragments.The formation of massive primordial objects is thus strongly dependent on the thermodynamics of the gas. A salient feature of our results is that for the formation of massive objects, e.g. intermediate mass black holes, feedback effects are not required to suppress $H_{2}$ cooling, as molecular hydrogen is collisionally dissociated at temperatures higher than $10^{4}$ K as a consequence of Lyman alpha trapping.