Transition From Population III to Population II Stars

Abstract

The transition from Population III to Population II stars is determined by the presence of a sufficient amount of metals, in particular, oxygen and carbon. The vastly different yields of these relevant metals between different initial stellar mass functions would then cause such a transition to occur at different times. We show that the transition from Pop III to Pop II stars is likely to occur before the universe can be reionized, if the IMF is entirely very massive stars (M > 140 M_sun). A factor of about 10 more ionizing photons would be produced in the case with normal top-heavy IMF (e.g., M ~ 10-100 M_sun), when such a transition occurs. Thus, a high Thomson optical depth (tau_e >= 0.11-0.14) may be indication that the Population III stars possess a more conventional top-heavy IMF.

4 pages, 2 figures. Minor revisions, accepted by ApJ Letters

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Critical Metallicity and Fine-Structure Emission of Primordial Gas Enriched by the First Stars
• Signatures of Galactic Superwinds: Inhomogeneous Metal Enrichment of the Lyman Alpha Forest
• Impact of inter-correlated initial binary parameters on double black hole and neutron star mergers
• Lower Metal Enrichment of Virialized Gas in Minihalos
• Hierarchical Growth and Cosmic Star Formation: Enrichment, Outflows and Supernova Rates
• Primordial black holes with mass $10^{16}-10^{17}$ g and reionization of the Universe
• Source Mergers and Bubble Growth During Reionization
• Quark-Novae, cosmic reionization, and early r-process element production
• Potential contributions of Pop III and intermediate-mass Pop II stars to cosmic chemical enrichment
• Negative feedback effects on star formation history and cosmic reionization
• Constraint on Matter Power Spectrum on $10^6-10^9{M}_{\odot }$ Scales from ${\tau }_e$