151 research outputs found
Transition From Population III to Population II Stars
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.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Minor revisions, accepted by ApJ Letter
Probing the Statistics of the Temperature-Density Relation of the IGM
Gravitational instability induces a simple correlation between the large and
small scale fluctuations of the Ly-alpha flux spectrum. However,
non-gravitational processes involved in structure formation and evolution will
alter such a correlation. In this paper we explore how scatter in the
temperature-density relation of the IGM reduces the gravitationally induced
scale-scale correlation. By examining whether or not observations of the
correlation are close to that predicted by pure gravity, this puts constraints
on the scatter in the temperature-density relation and in turn on any physical
process which would lead to scatter, e.g. strong fluctuations in the UV
background or radiative transfer effects. By applying this method to high
resolution Keck spectra of Q 1422+231 and HS 1946+7658, we find the predicted
correlation signal induced by gravity, and the diminishing of this correlation
signal at small scales. This suggests extra physics affects the small-scale
structure of the forest, and we can constrain the scatter in the
temperature-density relation to a conservative 20% upper limit. A crude model
suggests, if there is any spatial correlation of temperature, the coherence
length scale must be smaller than ~ 0.3/h Mpc to be consistent with the Keck
data.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Minor revisions, accepted by ApJ Letter
- …