Primordial Gas Clouds Research Articles

Studying the Effect of Radiation Pressure on Evolution of a Population III Stellar Cluster

Recent numerical simulations have shown that the unstable disk within the central regime of the primordial gas cloud fragments to form multiple protostars on several scales. Their evolution depends on the mass accretion phenomenon, interaction with the surrounding medium and radiative feedback respectively. In this work, we use a fast semianalytical framework in order to model multiple protostars within a rotating cloud, where the mass accretion is estimated via a Bondi–Hoyle flow and the feedback process is approximated through radiation pressure. We observe that while some of the evolving protostars possibly grow massive (≈1–75 M ⊙) via accretion and mergers, a fraction of them (≈20%) are likely to be ejected from the parent cloud with a mass corresponding to M * ≲ 0.8 M ⊙. These low-mass protostars may be considered as the potential candidates to enter the zero-age-main-sequence phase and possibly survive until the present epoch.

Low-mass Population III Star Formation due to the HD Cooling Induced by Weak Lyman–Werner Radiation

Lyman–Werner (LW) radiation photodissociating molecular hydrogen (H2) influences the thermal and dynamical evolution of the Population III (Pop III) star-forming gas cloud. The effect of powerful LW radiation has been well investigated in the context of supermassive black hole formation in the early Universe. However, the average intensity in the early Universe is several orders of magnitude lower. For a comprehensive study, we investigate the effects of LW radiation at 18 different intensities, ranging from J LW/J 21 = 0 (no radiation) to 30 (H-cooling cloud), on the primordial star-forming gas cloud obtained from a three-dimensional cosmological simulation. The overall trend with increasing radiation intensity is a gradual increase in the gas cloud temperature, consistent with previous works. Due to the HD cooling, however, the dependence of gas cloud temperature on J LW deviates from the aforementioned increasing trend for a specific range of intensities (J LW/J 21 = 0.025–0.09). In HD-cooling clouds, the temperature remained below 200 K during 105 yr after the first formation of the high-density region, maintaining a low accretion rate. Finally, the HD-cooling clouds have only a low-mass dense core (above 108 cm−3) with about 1–16 M ⊙, inside of which a low-mass Pop III star with ≤0.8 M ⊙ (a so-called “surviving star”) could form. The upper limit of star formation efficiency Mcore/Mvir,gas significantly decreases from 10−3 to 10−5 as HD cooling becomes effective. This tendency indicates that, whereas the total gas mass in the host halo increases with the LW radiation intensity, the total Pop III stellar mass does not increase similarly.

Zero Metallicity with Zero CPU Hours: Masses of the First Stars on the Laptop

We develop an analytic model for the mass of the first stars forming in the centers of primordial gas clouds as a function of host halo mass, redshift, and degree of rotation. The model is based on the estimation of key timescales determining the following three processes: the collapse of the gas cloud, the accretion onto the protostellar core, and the radiative feedback of the protostellar core. The final stellar mass is determined by the total mass accreted until the radiative feedback halts the accretion. The analytic estimation, motivated by the result of the full numerical simulations, leads to algebraic expressions allowing an extremely fast execution. Despite its simplicity, the model reproduces the stellar mass scale and its parameter dependencies observed in state-of-the-art cosmological zoom-in simulations. This work clarifies the basic physical principles undergirding such numerical treatments and provides a path to efficiently calibrating numerical predictions against eventual observations of the first stars.

Amplification and Saturation of Turbulent Magnetic Fields in Collapsing Primordial Gas Clouds

Recent numerical studies suggest that magnetic fields play an important role in primordial star formation in the early Universe. However, the detailed evolution of the magnetic field in the collapse phase still has uncertainties because of the complicated physics associated with turbulence in a collapsing magnetized system. Here, we perform a suite of numerical MHD simulations that follow the collapse of magnetized, turbulent primordial gas clouds to investigate the evolution of the magnetic field associated with the turbulence, assuming a polytropic equation of state with exponent γ eff and with various numerical resolutions. In addition, we generalize the analytic theory of magnetic field growth/saturation so that it can deal with various exponents γ eff and turbulence energy spectra. We find that the numerical results are well reproduced by the theory for various γ eff through the collapse phase during the formation of the first stars. The magnetic field is eventually amplified by a factor of 1012–1015 due to kinematic and nonlinear turbulent dynamo effects and reaches 3%–100% of the equipartition level, depending on γ eff. We also find that the transition between the kinematic and nonlinear stages can be analytically estimated. These results indicate that the strong magnetic field accompanied by supersonic turbulence is a general property and suggest that it can play a crucial role in the formation of the first stars.

The Supersonic Project: Star Formation in Early Star Clusters without Dark Matter

The formation mechanism of globular clusters (GCs) has long been debated by astronomers. It was recently proposed that supersonically induced gas objects (SIGOs)–which formed in the early Universe due to the supersonic relative motion of baryons and dark matter at recombination–could be the progenitors of early GCs. In order to become GCs, SIGOs must form stars relatively efficiently despite forming outside of dark matter halos. We investigate the potential for star formation in SIGOs using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, including the aforementioned relative motions of baryons and dark matter, molecular hydrogen cooling in primordial gas clouds, and explicit star formation. We find that SIGOs do form stars and that the nascent star clusters formed through this process are accreted by dark matter halos on short timescales (∼a few hundred megayears). Thus, SIGOs may be found as intact substructures within these halos, analogous to many present-day GCs. From this result, we conclude that SIGOs are capable of forming star clusters with similar properties to globular clusters in the early Universe, and we discuss their detectability by upcoming JWST surveys.

Formation of supermassive stars in the first star clusters

ABSTRACT The formation of supermassive stars is believed to be an essential intermediate step for the formation of the massive black hole seeds that become the supermassive black holes powering the quasars observed in the early Universe. Numerical simulations have shown that supermassive stars can form in atomic-cooling haloes when protostars reach accretion rates higher than ∼10−2 M⊙ yr−1 and fragmentation is suppressed on pc scales. It is, however, still uncertain if a supermassive star still emerges when fragmentation occurs at smaller scales and a cluster of stars is formed instead. In this work, we explore the problem of massive object formation due to the interplay of collisions and accretion in star clusters at low metallicity. We model a small embedded cluster of accreting protostars following subparsec scale fragmentation during the collapse of a primordial gas cloud, and follow its evolution by performing N-body plus hydrodynamical simulations. Our results show that supermassive stars with 103 and 104 M⊙ are always formed due to the interplay of collisions and accretion, and in some cases these objects are part of a binary system. The resulting supermassive star is surrounded by tens of smaller stars with typical masses in the range 1–100 M⊙.

Simulating the Collapse of Rotating Primordial Gas Clouds to Study the Possibility of the Survival of Population III Protostars

It has been argued that the low-mass primordial stars (m Pop III ≤ 0.8 M ⊙) are likely to enter the main sequence and hence may possibly be found in present-day galaxies. However, due to limitations in existing numerical capabilities, current three-dimensional (3D) simulations of disk fragmentation are only capable of following a few thousand years of evolution after the formation of the first protostar. In this work, we use a modified version of the Gadget-2 smoothed particle hydrodynamics code to present the results of the nonlinear collapse of the gas clouds associated with various degrees of initial solid body rotation (parameterized by β) using a piecewise polytropic equation of state. The 3D simulations are followed until the epoch that occurs when 50M ⊙ of mass has been accreted in protostellar objects, which is adequate enough to investigate the dynamics of the protostars with the surrounding gaseous medium and to determine the mass function, accretion rate, and possibility of the survival of these protostellar objects to the present epoch. We found that evolving protostars that stay within slow-rotating parent clouds can become massive enough to survive, due to accretion in the absence of radiative feedback, whereas 10%–12% of those formed within fast-rotating clouds (β ≥ 0.1) could possibly be ejected from the gravitational bound cluster as low-mass stars.

Massive black holes at high redshifts from superconducting cosmic strings

ABSTRACT The observation of quasars at high redshifts presents a mystery in the theory of black hole formation. In order to source such objects, one often relies on the presence of heavy seeds ($M \approx 10^{4-6}{\rm M}_{\odot }$) in place at early times. Unfortunately, the formation of these heavy seeds are difficult to realize within the standard astrophysical context. Here, we investigate whether superconducting cosmic string loops can source sufficiently strong overdensities in the early universe to address this mystery. We review a set of direct collapse conditions under which a primordial gas cloud will undergo monolithic collapse into a massive black hole (forming with a mass of $M_{\rm BH} \approx 10^5{\rm M}_{\odot }$ at z ≈ 300 in our scenario), and systematically show how superconducting cosmic string loops can satisfy such conditions in regions of the Gμ − I parameter space.

H2 Cooling and Gravitational Collapse of Supersonically Induced Gas Objects

Abstract We study the formation and gravitational collapse of supersonically induced gas objects (SIGOs) in the early universe. We run cosmological hydrodynamics simulations of SIGOs, including relative streaming motions between baryons and dark matter. Our simulations also follow nonequilibrium chemistry and molecular hydrogen cooling in primordial gas clouds. A number of SIGOs are formed in the run with fast-streaming motions of 2 times the rms of the cosmological velocity fluctuations. We identify a particular gas cloud that condensates by H2 cooling without being hosted by a dark matter halo. The SIGO remains outside the virial radius of its closest halo, and it becomes Jeans unstable when the central gas-particle density reaches ∼100 cm−3 with a temperature of ∼200 K. The corresponding Jeans mass is ∼105 M ⊙, and thus the formation of primordial stars or a star cluster is expected in the SIGO.

Supermassive Star Formation in Magnetized Atomic-cooling Gas Clouds: Enhanced Accretion, Intermittent Fragmentation, and Continuous Mergers

Abstract The origin of supermassive black holes (with ≳109 M ⊙) in the early universe (redshift z ∼ 7) remains poorly understood. Gravitational collapse of a massive primordial gas cloud is a promising initial process, but theoretical studies have difficulty growing the black hole fast enough. We focus on the magnetic effects on star formation that occurs in an atomic-cooling gas cloud. Using a set of three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we investigate the star formation process in the magnetized atomic-cooling gas cloud with different initial magnetic field strengths. Our simulations show that the primordial magnetic seed field can be quickly amplified during the early accretion phase after the first protostar formation. The strong magnetic field efficiently extracts angular momentum from accreting gas and increases the accretion rate, which results in the high fragmentation rate in the gravitationally unstable disk region. On the other hand, the coalescence rate of fragments is also enhanced by the angular momentum transfer due to the magnetic effects. Almost all the fragments coalesce to the primary star, so the mass growth rate of the massive star increases due to the magnetic effects. We conclude that the magnetic effects support the direct collapse scenario of supermassive star formation.

Disc fragmentation and intermittent accretion on to supermassive stars

ABSTRACT Supermassive stars (SMSs) with ∼104–105 M⊙ are candidate objects for the origin of supermassive black holes observed at redshift z > 6. They are supposed to form in primordial-gas clouds that provide the central stars with gas at a high accretion rate, but their growth may be terminated in the middle due to the stellar ionizing radiation if the accretion is intermittent and its quiescent periods are longer than the Kelvin–Helmholtz (KH) time-scales at the stellar surfaces. In this paper, we examine the role of the ionizing radiation feedback based on the accretion history in two possible SMS-forming clouds extracted from cosmological simulations, following their evolution with vertically integrated two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations with detailed thermal and chemical models. The consistent treatment of the gas thermal evolution is crucial for obtaining the realistic accretion history, as we demonstrate by performing an additional run with a barotropic equation of state, in which the fluctuation of the accretion rate is artificially suppressed. We find that although the accretion becomes intermittent due to the formation of spiral arms and clumps in gravitationally unstable discs, the quiescent periods are always shorter than the KH time-scales, implying that SMSs can form without affected by the ionizing radiation.

H2self-shielding with non-LTE rovibrational populations: implications for cooling in protogalaxies

The abundance of molecular hydrogen (H2), the primary coolant in primordial gas, is critical for the thermodynamic evolution and star-formation histories in early protogalaxies. Determining the photodissociation rate of H2 by an incident Lyman-Werner (LW) flux is thus crucial, but prohibitively expensive to calculate on the fly in simulations. The rate is sensitive to the H2 rovibrational distribution, which in turn depends on the gas density, temperature, and incident LW radiation field. We use the publicly available cloudy package to model primordial gas clouds and compare exact photodissociation rate calculations to commonly-used fitting formulae. We find the fit from Wolcott-Green et al. (2011) is most accurate for moderate densities n~10^3 cm^{-3} and temperatures, T~10^3K, and we provide a new fit, which captures the increase in the rate at higher densities and temperatures, owing to the increased excited rovibrational populations in this regime. Our new fit has typical errors of a few percent percent up to n =<10^7 cm^{-3}, T =< 8000K, and H2 column density NH2 =<10^{17} cm^{-2}, and can be easily utilized in simulations. We also show that pumping of the excited rovibrational states of H2 by a strong LW flux further modifies the level populations when the gas density is low, and noticeably decreases self-shielding for J_21 > 10^3 and n < 10^2 cm^{-3}. This may lower the "critical flux" at which primordial gas remains H2-poor in some protogalaxies, enabling massive black hole seed formation.

Donald Lynden-Bell (1935–2018)

Donald Lynden-Bell was lucky in his heredity and his environment. His great-grandfather knew the famous astronomer John Herschel. His father, an army Colonel, inherited a telescope and introduced Donald to the wonders of the sky. At his school, Marlborough College, Donald was exceedingly well taught. He came up to Clare College to read mathematics. In his second year, he was supervised by the great physicist Abdus Salam, who advised him to divert for a year to study physics, which Donald did before returning to mathematics for his fourth year. He thereby had a superb launching-pad for research. Donald Lynden-Bell. Image courtesy of Amanda Smith and the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Donald’s doctoral supervisor was Leon Mestel, a world expert on cosmic magnetism. But Donald found Leon’s problems “too intractable,” so instead he began to forge his lifetime interest in stellar dynamics: how swarms of stars configured into the distinctively shaped clusters and galaxies that populate the cosmos. At that time the British had no access to world-class optical telescopes; California was the mecca for astronomers. So after Donald got his doctorate in 1960, he spent 2 formative years in Pasadena, California, where he had the luck to “click” with Allan Sandage, the high priest of astronomy at that time. Their joint project led to Donald’s first really famous paper (1): inferring how our Milky Way galaxy formed from a primordial spinning gas cloud, and what we could learn about its history from the orbits of the … [↵][1]1Email: mjr{at}ast.cam.ac.uk. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Cosmic dawn signal holds clue to dark matter.

Microwaves from the big bang probe primordial gas clouds as the first stars turn on.

Formation of the First Star Clusters and Massive Star Binaries by Fragmentation of Filamentary Primordial Gas Clouds

Abstract We perform a set of cosmological simulations of early structure formation incorporating baryonic streaming motions. We present a case where a significantly elongated gas cloud with ∼104 solar mass (M ⊙) is formed in a pre-galactic (∼107 M ⊙) dark halo. The gas streaming into the halo compresses and heats the massive filamentary cloud to a temperature of ∼10,000 Kelvin. The gas cloud cools rapidly by atomic hydrogen cooling, and then by molecular hydrogen cooling down to ∼400 Kelvin. The rapid decrease of the temperature and hence of the Jeans mass triggers fragmentation of the filament to yield multiple gas clumps with a few hundred solar masses. We estimate the mass of the primordial star formed in each fragment by adopting an analytic model based on a large set of radiation hydrodynamics simulations of protostellar evolution. The resulting stellar masses are in the range of ∼50–120 M ⊙. The massive stars gravitationally attract each other and form a compact star cluster. We follow the dynamics of the star cluster using a hybrid N-body simulation. We show that massive star binaries are formed in a few million years through multi-body interactions at the cluster center. The eventual formation of the remnant black holes will leave a massive black hole binary, which can be a progenitor of strong gravitational wave sources similar to those recently detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Formation of the First Stars and Blackholes

AbstractCosmic reionization is thought to be initiated by the first generation of stars and blackholes. We review recent progress in theoretical studies of early structure formation. Cosmic structure formation is driven by gravitational instability of primeval density fluctuations left over from Big Bang. At early epochs, there are baryonic streaming motions with significant relative velocity with respect to dark matter. The formation of primordial gas clouds is typically delayed by the streaming motions, but then physical conditions for the so-called direct collapse blackhole formation are realized in proto-galactic halos. We present a promising model in which intermediate mass blackholes are formed as early as z = 30.

Observations hint at a new recipe for giant black holes.

Direct collapse from primordial gas clouds could solve a cosmic timing problem.

A partially occulting MACHO‐microlensing event in the Twin Quasar Q0957+561

A doubly‐peaked quasar microlensing event in the lensed Twin Quasar Q0957+561 A,B (Colley and Schild 2003) is analysed within several lensing models. In the most realistic model a lens resolves in image B the ellipse shaped, bright inner rim of the quasar's accretion disk, intersecting it twice. This lens weighs 0.5 Earth mass and is located inside the Galaxy, at 3 kpc distance. During the passing, it partially occults the source, which allows to describe it as a primordial gas cloud of 1.4 Solar radius and 17 K temperature, in accordance with the theory of Gravitational Hydrodynamics. Lensing by such objects against the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic centre will also lead to occultation dips.

COSMOLOGICAL SIMULATIONS OF EARLY BLACK HOLE FORMATION: HALO MERGERS, TIDAL DISRUPTION, AND THE CONDITIONS FOR DIRECT COLLAPSE

ABSTRACT Gravitational collapse of a massive primordial gas cloud is thought to be a promising path for the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe. We study conditions for the so-called direct collapse (DC) black hole formation in a fully cosmological context. We combine a semianalytic model of early galaxy formation with halo merger trees constructed from dark matter N-body simulations. We locate a total of 68 possible DC sites in a volume of on a side. We then perform hydrodynamics simulations for 42 selected halos to study in detail the evolution of the massive clouds within them. We find only two successful cases where the gas clouds rapidly collapse to form stars. In the other cases, gravitational collapse is prevented by the tidal force exerted by a nearby massive halo, which otherwise should serve as a radiation source necessary for DC. Ram pressure stripping disturbs the cloud approaching the source. In many cases, a DC halo and its nearby light source halo merge before the onset of cloud collapse. When the DC halo is assembled through major mergers, the gas density increases rapidly to trigger gravitational instability. Based on our cosmological simulations, we conclude that the event rate of DC is an order of magnitude smaller than reported in previous studies, although the absolute rate is still poorly constrained. It is necessary to follow the dynamical evolution of a DC cloud and its nearby halo(s) in order to determine the critical radiation flux for DC.

On the effects of rotation in primordial star-forming clouds

The thermodynamical evolution of gas during the collapse of the primordial star-forming cloud depends significantly on the initial degree of rotation. However, there is no clear understanding of how the initial rotation can affect the heating and cooling process and hence the temperature that leads to the fragmentation of the gas during Population III star formation. We report the results from three\hbox{-}dimensional, smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of a rotating self-gravitating primordial gas cloud with a modified version of the Gadget-2 code, in which the initial ratio of the rotational to the gravitational energy ($\beta_0$) is varied over two orders of magnitude. We find that despite the lack of any initial turbulence and magnetic fields in the clouds, the angular momentum distribution leads to the formation and build-up of a disk that fragments into several clumps. We further examine the behavior of the protostars that form in both idealized as well as more realistic minihalos from the cosmological simulations. The thermodynamical evolution and the fragmentation behavior of the cosmological minihalos are similar to that of the artificial cases, especially in those with a similar $\beta_0$-parameter. Protostars with a higher rotation support exhibit spiral-arm-like structures on several scales, and have lower accretion rates. These type of clouds tend to fragment more, while some of the protostars escape from the cluster with the possibility of surviving until the present day. They also take much longer to form compared to their slowly rotating counterparts. We conclude that the use of appropriate initial conditions of the gas in minihalos is a pivotal and decisive quantity to study the evolution and final fate of the primordial stars.