A First Transients Survey with JWST: the FLARE project

Abstract

JWST was conceived and built to answer one of the most fundamental questions that humans can address empirically: "How did the Universe make its first stars?". Our First Lights At REionization (FLARE) project transforms the quest for the epoch of reionization from the static to the time domain. It targets the complementary question: "What happened to those first stars?". It will be answered by observations of the most luminous events: supernovae and accretion on to black holes formed by direct collapse from the primordial gas clouds. These transients provide direct constraints on star-formation rates (SFRs) and the truly initial Initial Mass Function (IMF), and they may identify possible stellar seeds of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Furthermore, our knowledge of the physics of these events at ultra-low metallicity will be much expanded. JWST's unique capabilities will detect these most luminous and earliest cosmic messengers easily in fairly shallow observations. However, these events are very rare at the dawn of cosmic structure formation and so require large area coverage. Time domain astronomy can be advanced to an unprecedented depth by means of a shallow field of JWST reaching 27 mag AB in 2 and 4.4 microns over a field as large as 0.1 square degree visited multiple times each year. Such a survey may set strong constraints or detect massive Pop III SNe at redshifts beyond 10, pinpointing the redshift of the first stars, or at least their death. Based on our current knowledge of superluminous supernovae (SLSNe), such a survey will find one or more SLSNe at redshifts above 6 in five years and possibly several direct collapse black holes. Although JWST is not designed as a wide field survey telescope, we show that such a wide field survey is possible with JWST and is critical in addressing several of its key scientific goals.

References in corpus (7)

• EMERGE - An empirical model for the formation of galaxies since $z\sim 10$
• The critical radiation intensity for direct collapse black hole formation: dependence on the radiation spectral shape
• Light curves of hydrogen-poor Superluminous Supernovae from the Palomar Transient Factory
• The Little Engines That Could? Globular Clusters Contribute Significantly to Reionization-era Star Formation
• A line-smeared treatment of opacities for the spectra and light curves from macronovae
• Detecting Ancient Supernovae at z ~ 5 - 12 with CLASH
• The Hubble Legacy Fields (HLF-GOODS-S) v1.5 Data Products: Combining 2442 Orbits of GOODS-S/CDF-S Region ACS and WFC3/IR Images

Cited by in corpus (7)

• When did Population III star formation end?
• Linear spectropolarimetry of 35 Type Ia Supernovae with VLT/FORS: An analysis of the Si II line polarization
• Detection strategies for the first supernovae with JWST
• Electromagnetic Bursts from Mergers of Oscillons in Axion-like Fields
• On the Detection of Supermassive Primordial Stars. II. Blue Supergiants
• Probing the High-Redshift Universe with SPICA: Toward the Epoch of Reionization and Beyond
• ASTRO2020 White Paper: JWST: Probing the Epoch of Reionization with a Wide Field Time-Domain Survey