The glow of primordial remnants

Abstract

We determine the expected surface brightness and photometric signature of a white dwarf remnant population, issued from primordial low-mass stars formed at high redshifts, in today galactic halos. We examine the radial dependence of such a contribution as well as its redshift dependence. Such a halo diffuse radiation is below the detection limit of present large field ground-based surveys, but should be observable with the HST and with the future JWST project. Since the surface brightness does not depend on the distance, the integration of several galactic dark halos along the line of sight will raise appreciably the chances of detection. Both the detection or the non-detection of such a remnant diffuse radiation within relevant detection limits offer valuable information on the minimum mass for star formation in the early universe and on the evolution of the stellar initial mass function.

8 pages, 6 figures, to be published in ApJ

References in corpus (12)

• Galactic Stellar and Substellar Initial Mass Function
• A stellar relic from the early Milky Way
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• The Imprint of the Cosmic Dark Ages on the Near Infrared Background
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• First Stars Contribution to the Near Infrared Background Fluctuations
• Observable Properties of Cosmological Reionization Sources
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Variations of the stellar initial mass function in the progenitors of massive early-type galaxies and in extreme starburst environments
• Cosmic Chemical Evolution with an Early Population of Intermediate Mass Stars
• The contribution of red dwarfs and white dwarfs to the halo dark matter
• The contribution of Oxygen-Neon white dwarfs to the MACHO content of the Galactic Halo
• Detectability of Population III stellar remnants as X-ray binaries from tidal captures in the local Universe