PISN-explorer: hunting the descendants of very massive first stars

Abstract

The very massive first stars ($m>100{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) were fundamental to the early phases of reionization, metal enrichment, and super-massive black hole formation. Among them, those with $140\le m/{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }\le 260$ are predicted to evolve as Pair Instability Supernovae (PISN) leaving a unique chemical signature in their chemical yields. Still, despite long searches, the stellar descendants of PISN remain elusive. Here we propose a new methodology, the PISN-explorer, to identify candidates for stars with a dominant PISN enrichment. The PISN-explorer is based on a combination of physically driven models, and the FERRE code; and applied to data from large spectroscopic surveys (APOGEE, GALAH, GES, MINCE, and the JINA database). We looked into more than 1.4 million objects and built a catalogue with 166 candidates of PISN descendants. One of which, 2M13593064+3241036, was observed with UVES at VLT and full chemical signature was derived, including the killing elements, Cu and Zn. We find that our proposed methodology is efficient in selecting PISN candidates from both the Milky Way and dwarf satellite galaxies such as Sextans or Draco. Further high-resolution observations are highly required to confirm our best selected candidates, therefore allowing us to probe the existence and properties of the very massive First Stars.

13 pages, 7 figures Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (27)

• The GALAH Survey: Scientific Motivation
• The GALAH+ Survey: Third Data Release
• A Search for Stars of Very Low Metal Abundance. VI. Detailed Abundances of 313 Metal-Poor Stars
• First stars VI - Abundances of C, N, O, Li, and mixing in extremely metal-poor giants. Galactic evolution of the light elements
• Primordial Star Formation under the Influence of Far Ultraviolet Radiation: 1540 Cosmological Halos and the Stellar Mass Distribution
• The Mass Spectrum of the First Stars
• 4MOST: Project overview and information for the First Call for Proposals
• The Formation of the First Stars II. Radiative Feedback Processes and Implications for the Initial Mass Function
• The Chemical Evolution of the Draco Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy
• A non-LTE study of neutral and singly-ionized calcium in late-type stars
• The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey: Implementation, data products, open cluster survey, science, and legacy
• Non-LTE aluminium abundances in late-type stars
• The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey: Motivation, implementation, GIRAFFE data processing, analysis, and final data products
• Uncovering the Chemical Signature of the First Stars in the Universe
• Exploiting the Gaia EDR3 photometry to derive stellar temperatures
• Limits on Pop III star formation with the most iron-poor stars
• Life and times of dwarf spheroidal galaxies
• The oldest and most metal poor stars in the APOSTLE Local Group simulations
• Deep SDSS optical spectroscopy of distant halo stars I. Atmospheric parameters and stellar metallicity distribution
• NLTE for APOGEE: Simultaneous Multi-Element NLTE Radiative Transfer
• Probing the existence of very massive first stars
• Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies: unveiling the minimum mass of the first stars
• WHT follow-up observations of extremely metal-poor stars identified from SDSS and LAMOST
• Influence of departures from LTE on calcium, titanium, and iron abundance determinations in cool giants of different metallicities
• Evidence for the accretion origin of halo stars with an extreme r-process enhancement
• The S2 Stream: the shreds of a primitive dwarf galaxy
• MINCE I. Presentation of the project and of the first year sample

Cited by in corpus (12)

• A needle in a haystack? Catching Pop III stars in the Epoch of Reionization: I. Pop III star forming environments
• Tracing Pop III supernovae with extreme energies through the Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy
• Machine learning detects multiplicity of the first stars in stellar archaeology data
• The energy distribution of the first supernovae
• A-SLOTH reveals the nature of the first stars
• True Pair-instability Supernova Descendant: Implications for the First Stars' Mass Distribution
• Chemical Diagnostics to Unveil Environments Enriched by First Stars
• On the dearth of C-enhanced metal-poor stars in the Galactic bulge
• The THESAN-ZOOM project: Population III star formation continues until the end of reionization
• Revisiting inelastic Cu+H collisions and the non-LTE Galactic evolution of copper
• Impacts of the ${}^{12}\mathrm{C}{\left(\alpha ,\gamma \right)}^{16}\mathrm{O}$ reaction rate on ${}^{56}\mathrm{Ni}$ nucleosynthesis in pair-instability supernovae
• The Gaia RVS benchmark stars II. A sample of stars selected for their Gaia high radial velocity