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The First Stars

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Book cover The First Galaxies

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 396))

Abstract

The first stars to form in the Universe—the so-called Population III stars—bring an end to the cosmological Dark Ages, and exert an important influence on the formation of subsequent generations of stars and on the assembly of the first galaxies. Developing an understanding of how and when the first Population III stars formed and what their properties were is an important goal of modern astrophysical research. In this review, I discuss our current understanding of the physical processes involved in the formation of Population III stars. I show how we can identify the mass scale of the first dark matter halos to host Population III star formation, and discuss how gas undergoes gravitational collapse within these halos, eventually reaching protostellar densities. I highlight some of the most important physical processes occurring during this collapse, and indicate the areas where our current understanding remains incomplete. Finally, I discuss in some detail the behaviour of the gas after the formation of the first Population III protostar. I discuss both the conventional picture, where the gas does not undergo further fragmentation and the final stellar mass is set by the interplay between protostellar accretion and protostellar feedback, and also the recently advanced picture in which the gas does fragment and where dynamical interactions between fragments have an important influence on the final distribution of stellar masses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A group lead by X. Urbain at the Université Catholique de Louvain has recently made new experimental measurements of the rate of this reaction at low temperatures, but at the time of writing, the results of this work remain unpublished.

  2. 2.

    For comparison, note that the energy separation between the J = 0 and J = 1 rotational levels of CO is roughly 5 K.

  3. 3.

    Discussions of Population III star formation often refer to the cold clump of gas at the centre of the minihalo as a “fragment”, and speak of M BE as the “fragmentation mass scale”, but in the case of the very first generation of star-forming minihalos, this is actually something of a misnomer, as very seldom does more than one “fragment” form in a given minihalo.

  4. 4.

    A similar process can also occur during collisions of atomic hydrogen or atomic helium with H2, but it is the H2-H2 case that is the most relevant here.

  5. 5.

    The value quoted here for the mass resolution of the Stacy et al. (2010) simulation assumes that 100 or more SPH particles are required to resolve gravitationally bound structures, which is the typical resolution limit adopted in studies of present-day star formation. Stacy et al. (2010) assume that only 48 SPH particles are required, and hence quote a mass resolution that is roughly a factor of two smaller.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank a large number of people with whom he has had interesting and informative discussions about the physics of Population III star formation, including T. Abel, V. Bromm, P. Clark, G. Dopcke, T. Greif, Z. Haiman, T. Hosokawa, R. Klessen, M. Norman, K. Omukai, B. O’Shea, D. Schleicher, B. Smith, R. Smith, A. Stacy, J. Tan, M. Turk, D. Whalen, and N. Yoshida. Special thanks also go to R. Smith and M. Turk for providing some of the data plotted in Fig. 3, and to P. Clark for his assistance with the production of Fig. 4. Financial support for this work was provided by the Baden-Württemberg-Stiftung via their program International Collaboration II (grant P-LS-SPII/18), from the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung via the ASTRONET project STAR FORMAT (grant 05A09VHA), and by a Frontier grant of Heidelberg University sponsored by the German Excellence Initiative.

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  1. Institut für Theoretische Astrophysik, Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Albert-Ueberle-Str. 2, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany

    Simon Glover

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  1. Joint ALMA Observatory, Alonso de Cordova 3107, Vitacura, Santiago, 19, Chile

    Tommy Wiklind

  2. , Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, University Ave. 900, Riverside, 92521, USA

    Bahram Mobasher

  3. , College of Nat. Sc., Dept. of Astronomy, University of Texas, Austin, Austin, 78712, USA

    Volker Bromm

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Glover, S. (2013). The First Stars. In: Wiklind, T., Mobasher, B., Bromm, V. (eds) The First Galaxies. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 396. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32362-1_3

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