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Title:
Metallicity-Induced Fragmentation and the Transition from Pop III to Pop II
Authors:
Smith, Britton D.; Sigurdsson, S.
Affiliation:
AA(Pennsylvania State Univ.), AB(Pennsylvania State Univ.)
Publication:
2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #133.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.1081
Publication Date:
12/2006
Origin:
AAS
Bibliographic Code:
2006AAS...20913306S

Abstract

Numerical simulations of the formation of pop III stars suggest that they were much more massive than the pop II and pop I stars observed today. This is due to the collapse dynamics of metal-free gas, which is regulated by the radiative cooling properties of molecular hydrogen. We study how the collapse of gas-clouds is altered by the addition of metals to the star-forming environment. We create a method to include the radiative cooling of all elemental species from H to Zn, with any abundance patterns, in numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation. This method uses interpolation over tables of externally computed cooling rates produced with the photo-ionization software, Cloudy. In order to determine the critical metallicity required for a star-forming core to undergo fragmentation, we perform numerical simulations similar to those of the first stars with varying levels of metal enrichment. We use the adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic/n-body code, Enzo, along with our newly created metal cooling routines. Our simulations show that gas clouds endowed with a metallicity of approximately 10-3.5 solar metallicity will fragment and form multiple objects, which is in excellent agreement with earlier studies and predictions. Additionally, we examine the spectrum of masses created at different metallicities. This work is the first step in numerically simulating the transition from pop III to pop II star formation that took place early in the history of the universe. This work is funded by a Hubble Theory Grant.
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