Abundance anomalies in metal-poor stars from Population III supernova ejecta hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper uses hydrodynamic simulations to study how supernova explosion dynamics influence the chemical signatures in the first low-mass stars, revealing effects like incomplete mixing and anisotropic ejecta that impact observed abundances.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation approach that accounts for hydrodynamic effects on chemical enrichment, challenging the assumption of fully mixed supernova ejecta in early star formation.

Findings

Reverse shock heating causes carbon-enhancement in re-collapsing gas.

Incomplete mixing of ejecta explains observed abundance scatter.

Hydrodynamic effects influence the interpretation of Population II star compositions.

Abstract

We present a simulation of the long-term evolution of a Population III supernova remnant in a cosmological minihalo. Employing passive Lagrangian tracer particles, we investigate how chemical stratification and anisotropy in the explosion can affect the abundances of the first low-mass, metal-enriched stars. We find that reverse shock heating can leave the inner mass shells at entropies too high to cool, leading to carbon-enhancement in the re-collapsing gas. This hydrodynamic selection effect could explain the observed incidence of carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars at low metallicity. We further explore how anisotropic ejecta distributions, recently seen in direct numerical simulations of core-collapse explosions, may translate to abundances in metal-poor stars. We find that some of the observed scatter in the Population II abundance ratios can be explained by an incomplete mixing of supernova ejecta, even in the case of only one contributing enrichment event. We demonstrate that the customary hypothesis of fully-mixed ejecta clearly fails if post-explosion hydrodynamics prefers the recycling of some nucleosynthetic products over others. Furthermore, to fully exploit the stellar-archaeological program of constraining the Pop III initial mass function from the observed Pop II abundances, considering these hydrodynamical transport effects is crucial. We discuss applications to the rich chemical structure of ultra-faint dwarf satellite galaxies, to be probed in unprecedented detail with upcoming spectroscopic surveys.