The Ultimately Large Telescope -- what kind of facility do we need to detect Population III stars?

Abstract

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope will open up a new window for observations at the highest redshifts, reaching out to z~15. However, even with this new facility, the first stars will remain out of reach, as they are born in small minihalos with luminosities too faint to be detected even by the longest exposure times. In this paper, we investigate the basic properties of the Ultimately Large Telescope, a facility that can detect Population III star formation regions at high redshift. Observations will take place in the near-infrared and therefore a moon-based facility is proposed. An instrument needs to reach magnitudes as faint as 39mag${}_{\mathrm{AB}}$, corresponding to a primary mirror size of about 100m in diameter. Assuming JWST NIRCam filters, we estimate that Pop III sources will have unique signatures in a colour-colour space and can be identified unambiguously.

5 figures, accepted by ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (27)

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• The Challenges of Identifying Population III Stars in the Early Universe
• Unveiling the contribution of Pop III stars in primeval galaxies at redshift $\ge 6$
• Stellar winds and metal enrichment from fast-rotating Population III stars
• Metal Mixing in Minihalos: The Descendants of Pair-Instability Supernovae
• Probing the initial mass function of the first stars with transients
• Machine learning detects multiplicity of the first stars in stellar archaeology data
• On the probability of the extremely lensed $z$=6.2 Earendel source being a Population~III star
• Gravitational waves from the remnants of the first stars in nuclear star clusters
• Probing Population III Initial Mass Functions with He II/H$\alpha$ Intensity Mapping
• Gravitational waves from mergers of Population III binary black holes: roles played by two evolution channels
• The limits of cosmology: role of the Moon
• The THESAN-ZOOM project: Population III star formation continues until the end of reionization
• Dwarf galaxy formation with and without dark matter-baryon streaming velocities
• Deciphering stellar metallicities in the early Universe: Case study of a young galaxy at z = 4.77 in the MUSE eXtremely Deep Field
• The mass distribution of the first stars can be determined via the 21-cm signal
• Effects of chemically homogeneous evolution of the first stars on the 21-cm signal and reionization
• Simulating the collapse of rotating primordial gas clouds to study the survival possibility of Pop III protostars
• An extremely metal-poor Lyman $\alpha$ emitter candidate at $z=6$ revealed through absorption spectroscopy
• Detectability of Population III stellar remnants as X-ray binaries from tidal captures in the local Universe
• Radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of Population III star formation during the Epoch of Reionization
• The first stars
• Revealing the formation histories of the first stars with the cosmic near-infrared background
• LYRA II: Cosmological dwarf galaxy formation with inhomogeneous Population III enrichment