On the Detection of Supermassive Primordial Stars

Abstract

The collapse of supermassive primordial stars in hot, atomically-cooled halos may have given birth to the first quasars at $z\sim$ 15 - 20. Recent numerical simulations of these rapidly accreting stars reveal that they are cool, red hypergiants shrouded by dense envelopes of pristine atomically-cooled gas at 6,000 - 8,000 K, with luminosities $L$ $\gtrsim$ 10${}^{10}$ L${}_{\odot }$. Could such luminous but cool objects be detected as the first stage of quasar formation in future near infrared (NIR) surveys? We have now calculated the spectra of supermassive primordial stars in their birth envelopes with the Cloudy code. We find that some of these stars will be visible to JWST at $z\lesssim$ 20 and that with modest gravitational lensing Euclid and WFIRST could detect them out to $z\sim$ 10 - 12. Rather than obscuring the star, its accretion envelope enhances its visibility in the NIR today by reprocessing its short-wavelength flux into photons that are just redward of the Lyman limit in the rest frame of the star.

6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJL

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Turbulent Cold Flows Gave Birth to the First Quasars
• Modeling Supermassive Primordial Stars with MESA
• Stability analysis of supermassive primordial stars: a new mass range for general relativistic instability supernovae
• Conditions for detecting lensed Population III galaxies in blind surveys with the James Webb Space Telescope, the Roman Space Telescope and Euclid
• Finding Direct-Collapse Black Holes at Birth
• On the Detection of Supermassive Primordial Stars. II. Blue Supergiants
• Spectral properties and detectability of supermassive stars in protoglobular clusters at high redshift
• Magnetic braking of supermassive stars through winds
• Evolution and explosions of metal enriched supermassive stars: proton rich general relativistic instability supernovae
• Pulsations of primordial supermassive stars induced by a general relativistic instability; visible to JWST at z$>$12
• Radio Power from Direct-Collapse Black Holes
• Detectability of Supermassive Dark Stars with the Roman Space Telescope
• Galaxy Formation and Symbiotic Evolution with the Inter-Galactic Medium in the Age of ELT-ANDES
• 3D hydrodynamics simulations of core convection in supermassive main-sequence stars
• Search strategies for supermassive stars in young clusters and application to nearby galaxies
• Spectral Energy Distribution of the First Galaxies: Contribution from Pre-Main-Sequence Stars
• Signatures of Exploding Supermassive PopIII Stars at High Redshift in JWST, EUCLID and Roman Space Telescope
• Finding lensed direct-collapse black holes and supermassive primordial stars