The Birth of a Galaxy: Primordial Metal Enrichment and Stellar Populations

TL;DR

This study uses advanced simulations to explore how the first stars enriched the early universe with metals, leading to the formation of subsequent stellar populations and explaining observed metallicity floors.

Contribution

It presents a detailed radiation hydrodynamics simulation of the transition from Population III to II star formation, highlighting the role of supernovae in early metal enrichment.

Findings

A single pair-instability supernova enriches halos to the observed metallicity floor.

Gas fractions recover to near-cosmic levels in halos with rich merger histories.

Stellar metallicities do not directly correlate with stellar ages due to halo mergers.

Abstract

By definition, Population III stars are metal-free, and their protostellar collapse is driven by molecular hydrogen cooling in the gas-phase, leading to large characteristic masses. Population II stars with lower characteristic masses form when the star-forming gas reaches a critical metallicity of 10^{-6} - 10^{-3.5} Z_\odot. We present an adaptive mesh refinement radiation hydrodynamics simulation that follows the transition from Population III to II star formation. The maximum spatial resolution of 1 comoving parsec allows for individual molecular clouds to be well-resolved and their stellar associations to be studied in detail. We model stellar radiative feedback with adaptive ray tracing. A top-heavy initial mass function for the Population III stars is considered, resulting in a plausible distribution of pair-instability supernovae and associated metal enrichment. We find that the gas fraction recovers from 5 percent to nearly the cosmic fraction in halos with merger histories rich in halos above 10^7 solar masses. A single pair-instability supernova is sufficient to enrich the host halo to a metallicity floor of 10^{-3} Z_\odot and to transition to Population II star formation. This provides a natural explanation for the observed floor on damped Lyman alpha (DLA) systems metallicities reported in the literature, which is of this order. We find that stellar metallicities do not necessarily trace stellar ages, as mergers of halos with established stellar populations can create superpositions of t-Z evolutionary tracks. A bimodal metallicity distribution is created after a starburst occurs when the halo can cool efficiently through atomic line cooling.