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The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade Participants
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Poster
Title: Primordial Supernovae and the Chemical Enrichment of the Early IGM Author(s): Candace Joggerst Abstract: The first stars in the Universe cannot yet be directly observed, but clues to their nature can be found in their nucleosynthetic imprint on ancient metal-poor stars being surveyed in the Galactic halo today. The first metals reached the next generation of stars through several hydrodynamical processes, beginning with the mixing of heavy elements in the interiors of stars prior to their breakout into the early IGM. We present 2 and 3 dimensional simulations of mixing and fallback within both core-collapse and pair-instability supernovae at Z = 0 and 10^-4 Z_solar on spatial scales from 10^12 cm to 0.01 pc. We follow both mixing and fallback within the stellar envelope and the interaction of the ejecta with the circumstellar medium. We find that the primary contributors of metals to the early universe were 15 - 40 solar mass core-collapse supernovae with explosion energies of less than 2.4x10^51 ergs. These roughly spherical, moderately energetic explosions adequately reproduce the abundance patterns found in the HMP and EMP stars surveyed to date.
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