Population III stars around the Milky Way

TL;DR

This paper investigates the escape and distribution of Population III stars from early mini-halos, suggesting many could survive unpolluted and be observable today, with implications for understanding the Milky Way's formation.

Contribution

It models the ejection of low-mass Pop~III stars from mini-halos and predicts their spatial distribution, highlighting their potential to be observed as pristine stars.

Findings

Hundreds to tens of thousands of Pop~III stars escape from mini-halos.

Escaped stars distribute beyond the stellar halo, following a dark matter-like density profile.

Some escaped stars reach intergalactic space, remaining unpolluted.

Abstract

We explore the possibility of observing Population III (Pop~III) stars, born of the primordial gas. Pop~III stars with masses below $0.8 M_\odot$ should survive to date though are not observed yet, but the existence of stars with low metallicity as [Fe/H]$ < -5$ in the Milky Way halo suggests the surface pollution of Pop~III stars with accreted metals from the interstellar gas after birth. In this paper, we investigate the runaway of Pop~III stars from their host mini-halos, considering the ejection of secondary members from binary systems when their massive primaries explode as supernovae. These stars save them from the surface pollution. By computing the star formation and chemical evolution along with the hierarchical structure formation based on the extended Press--Schechter merger trees, we demonstrate that several hundreds to tens of thousands of low-mass Pop~III stars escape from the building blocks of the Milky Way. The second and later generations of extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars are also escaped from the mini-halos. We discuss the spatial distributions of these escaped stars by evaluating the distances between the mini-halos in the branches of merger trees under the spherical collapse model of dark matter halos. It is demonstrated that the escaped stars distribute beyond the stellar halo with a density profile close to the dark matter halo, while the Pop~III stars are slightly more centrally concentrated . Some escaped stars leave the Milky Way and spread into the intergalactic space. Based on the results, we discuss the feasibility of observing the Pop~III stars with the pristine surface abundance.