scholarly journals Cradles of the first stars: self-shielding, halo masses, and multiplicity

2020 ◽  
Vol 492 (3) ◽  
pp. 4386-4397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Skinner ◽  
John H Wise

ABSTRACT The formation of Population III (Pop III) stars is a critical step in the evolution of the early Universe. To understand how these stars affected their metal-enriched descendants, the details of how, why and where Pop III formation takes place needs to be determined. One of the processes that is assumed to greatly affect the formation of Pop III stars is the presence of a Lyman–Werner (LW) radiation background, that destroys H2, a necessary coolant in the creation of Pop III stars. Self-shielding can alleviate the effect the LW background has on the H2 within haloes. In this work, we perform a cosmological simulation to study the birthplaces of Pop III stars, using the adaptive mesh refinement code enzo. We investigate the distribution of host halo masses and its relationship to the LW background intensity. Compared to previous work, haloes form Pop III stars at much lower masses, up to a factor of a few, due to the inclusion of H2 self-shielding. We see no relationship between the LW intensity and host halo mass. Most haloes form multiple Pop III stars, with a median number of four, up to a maximum of 16, at the instance of Pop III formation. Our results suggest that Pop III star formation may be less affected by LW radiation feedback than previously thought and that Pop III multiple systems are common.

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (S270) ◽  
pp. 231-234
Author(s):  
Stella S. R. Offner

AbstractForming stars emit a significant amount of radiation into their natal environment. While the importance of radiation feedback from high-mass stars is widely accepted, radiation has generally been ignored in simulations of low-mass star formation. I use ORION, an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) three-dimensional gravito-radiation-hydrodynamics code, to model low-mass star formation in a turbulent molecular cloud. I demonstrate that including radiation feedback has a profound effect on fragmentation and protostellar multiplicity. Although heating is mainly confined within the core envelope, it is sufficient to suppress disk fragmentation that would otherwise result in low-mass companions or brown dwarfs. As a consequence, turbulent fragmentation, not disk fragmentation, is likely the origin of low-mass binaries.


2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-302
Author(s):  
Greg L. Bryan ◽  
Tom Abel ◽  
Michael L. Norman

As an entry for the 2001 Gordon Bell Award in the "special" category, we describe our 3-d, hybrid, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) codeEnzodesigned for high-resolution, multiphysics, cosmological structure formation simulations. Our parallel implementation places no limit on the depth or complexity of the adaptive grid hierarchy, allowing us to achieve unprecedented spatial and temporal dynamic range. We report on a simulation of primordial star formation which develops over 8000 subgrids at 34 levels of refinement to achieve a local refinement of a factor of 1012in space and time. This allows us to resolve the properties of the first stars which form in the universe assuming standard physics and a standard cosmological model. Achievingextreme resolutionrequires the use of 128-bit extended precision arithmetic (EPA) to accurately specify the subgrid positions. We describe our EPA AMR implementation on the IBM SP2 Blue Horizon system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (S341) ◽  
pp. 253-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li-Hsin Chen ◽  
Ke-Jung Chen

AbstractModern cosmological simulations suggest that the hierarchical assembly of dark matter halos provided the gravitational wells that allowed the primordial gases to form stars and galaxies inside them. The first galaxies comprised of the first systems of stars gravitationally bound in dark matter halos are naturally recognized as the building blocks of early Universe. To understand the formation of the first galaxies, we use an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) cosmological code, Enzo to simulate the formation and evolution of the first galaxies. We first model an isolated galaxy by considering much microphysics such as star formation, stellar feedback, and primordial gas cooling. To examine the effect of Pop III stellar feedback to the first galaxy formation, we adjust the initial temperature, density distribution and metallicity distributions by assuming different IMFs of the first stars. Our results suggest that star formation in the first galaxies is sensitive to the initial conditions of Pop III supernovae and their remnants. Our study can help to correlate the populations of the first stars and supernovae to star formation inside these first galaxies which may be soon observed by the (James Webb Space Telescope JWST).


2020 ◽  
Vol 501 (2) ◽  
pp. 1755-1765
Author(s):  
Andrew Pontzen ◽  
Martin P Rey ◽  
Corentin Cadiou ◽  
Oscar Agertz ◽  
Romain Teyssier ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT We introduce a new method to mitigate numerical diffusion in adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations of cosmological galaxy formation, and study its impact on a simulated dwarf galaxy as part of the ‘EDGE’ project. The target galaxy has a maximum circular velocity of $21\, \mathrm{km}\, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$ but evolves in a region that is moving at up to $90\, \mathrm{km}\, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$ relative to the hydrodynamic grid. In the absence of any mitigation, diffusion softens the filaments feeding our galaxy. As a result, gas is unphysically held in the circumgalactic medium around the galaxy for $320\, \mathrm{Myr}$, delaying the onset of star formation until cooling and collapse eventually triggers an initial starburst at z = 9. Using genetic modification, we produce ‘velocity-zeroed’ initial conditions in which the grid-relative streaming is strongly suppressed; by design, the change does not significantly modify the large-scale structure or dark matter accretion history. The resulting simulation recovers a more physical, gradual onset of star formation starting at z = 17. While the final stellar masses are nearly consistent ($4.8 \times 10^6\, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ and $4.4\times 10^6\, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ for unmodified and velocity-zeroed, respectively), the dynamical and morphological structure of the z = 0 dwarf galaxies are markedly different due to the contrasting histories. Our approach to diffusion suppression is suitable for any AMR zoom cosmological galaxy formation simulations, and is especially recommended for those of small galaxies at high redshift.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (S237) ◽  
pp. 358-362
Author(s):  
M. K. Ryan Joung ◽  
Mordecai-Mark Mac Low

AbstractWe report on a study of interstellar turbulence driven by both correlated and isolated supernova explosions. We use three-dimensional hydrodynamic models of a vertically stratified interstellar medium run with the adaptive mesh refinement code Flash at a maximum resolution of 2 pc, with a grid size of 0.5 × 0.5 × 10 kpc. Cold dense clouds form even in the absence of self-gravity due to the collective action of thermal instability and supersonic turbulence. Studying these clouds, we show that it can be misleading to predict physical properties such as the star formation rate or the stellar initial mass function using numerical simulations that do not include self-gravity of the gas. Even if all the gas in turbulently Jeans unstable regions in our simulation is assumed to collapse and form stars in local freefall times, the resulting total collapse rate is significantly lower than the value consistent with the input supernova rate. The amount of mass available for collapse depends on scale, suggesting a simple translation from the density PDF to the stellar IMF may be questionable. Even though the supernova-driven turbulence does produce compressed clouds, it also opposes global collapse. The net effect of supernova-driven turbulence is to inhibit star formation globally by decreasing the amount of mass unstable to gravitational collapse.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (S270) ◽  
pp. 503-506
Author(s):  
Pedro Colín ◽  
Vladimir Avila-Reese ◽  
Octavio Valenzuela

AbstractCosmological Adaptive Mesh Refinement simulations are used to study the specific star formation rate (sSFR=SSF/Ms) history and the stellar mass fraction, fs=Ms/MT, of small galaxies, total masses MT between few × 1010 M⊙ to few ×1011 M⊙. Our results are compared with recent observational inferences that show the so-called “downsizing in sSFR” phenomenon: the less massive the galaxy, the higher on average is its sSFR, a trend seen at least since z ~ 1. The simulations are not able to reproduce this phenomenon, in particular the high inferred values of sSFR, as well as the low values of fs constrained from observations. The effects of resolution and sub-grid physics on the SFR and fs of galaxies are discussed.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Oishi ◽  
Chris McKee ◽  
Richard Klein ◽  
Daniel J. Whalen ◽  
Volker Bromm ◽  
...  

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (S270) ◽  
pp. 425-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Federrath ◽  
Robi Banerjee ◽  
Daniel Seifried ◽  
Paul C. Clark ◽  
Ralf S. Klessen

AbstractWe implemented sink particles in the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) code FLASH to model the gravitational collapse and accretion in turbulent molecular clouds and cores. Sink particles are frequently used to measure properties of star formation in numerical simulations, such as the star formation rate and efficiency, and the mass distribution of stars. We show that only using a density threshold for sink particle creation is insufficient in case of supersonic flows, because the density can exceed the threshold in strong shocks that do not necessarily lead to local collapse. Additional physical collapse indicators have to be considered. We apply our AMR sink particle module to the formation of a star cluster, and compare it to a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code with sink particles. Our comparison shows encouraging agreement of gas and sink particle properties between the AMR and SPH code.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (S270) ◽  
pp. 7-17
Author(s):  
Michael L. Norman

AbstractThis contribution contains the introductory remarks that I presented at IAU Symposium 270 on “Computational Star Formation” held in Barcelona, Spain, May 31–June 4, 2010. I discuss the historical development of numerical MHD methods in astrophysics from a personal perspective. The recent advent of robust, higher-order accurate MHD algorithms and adaptive mesh refinement numerical simulations promises to greatly improve our understanding of the role of magnetic fields in star formation.


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