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.

arXiv comment9 pages, 4 figures, raw and plotted data in ancillary files

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