Stellar Signatures of Inhomogeneous Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Abstract

We evaluate abundance anomalies generated in patches of the universe where the baryon-to-photon ratio was locally enhanced by possibly many orders of magnitude in the range $\eta =10^{-10}-10^{-1}$. Our study is motivated by the possible survival of rare dense regions in the early universe, the most extreme of which, above a critical threshold, collapsed to form primordial black holes. If this occurred, one may expect there to also be a significant population of early-forming stars that formed in similar but subthreshold patches. We derive a range of element abundance signatures by performing BBN simulations at high values of the baryon-to-photon ratio that may be detectable in any surviving first generation stars of around a solar mass. Our predictions apply to metal-poor galactic halo stars, to old globular star clusters and to dwarf galaxies, and we compare with observations in each of these cases.

9 pages, 4 figures, raw and plotted data in ancillary files

References in corpus (7)

• Stochastic gravitational waves associated with the formation of primordial black holes
• Complete element abundances of nine stars in the r-process galaxy Reticulum II
• Solving puzzles of GW150914 by primordial black holes
• Inhomogeneous baryogenesis, cosmic antimatter, and dark matter
• Contribution of Neutron Star Mergers to the R-process Chemical Evolution in the Hierarchical Galaxy Formation
• Evidence for $\gtrsim 4$ Gyr timescales of neutron star mergers from Galactic archaeology
• Keck HIRES Spectroscopy of SkyMapper Commissioning Survey Candidate Extremely Metal-Poor Stars

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Implications of stochastic effects for primordial black hole production in ultra-slow-roll inflation
• Sensitivity forecasts for the cosmological recombination radiation in the presence of foregrounds
• X-ray signature of antistars in the Galaxy
• Fireball anti-nucleosynthesis
• On the original composition of the gas forming first-generation stars in clusters: insights from HST and JWST
• Nucleosynthetic signatures of primordial origin around supermassive black holes
• Does inhomogeneous big bang nucleosynthesis produce an inhomogeneous element distribution today?
• Constraining the original composition of the gas forming first-generation stars in globular clusters