Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,078

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 52 of the 52 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Formation of the First Stars. I. The Primordial Star‐forming Cloud

Open access
Bromm, Volker, Coppi, Paolo S., Larson, Richard B.·2002·The Astrophysical Journal
DOI 10.1086/323947
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark matter and gas components, using smoothed particle hydrodynamics, under a wide range of initial conditions, including the initial spin, the total mass of the halo, the redshift of virialization, the power spectrum of the DM fluctuations, the presence of HD cooling, and the number of particles employed in the simulation. We find characteristic values for the temperature, T ~ a few 100 K, and the density, n ~ 10 3 -10 4 cm -3 , characterizing the gas at the end of the initial free-fall phase. These values are rather insensitive to the initial conditions. The corresponding Jeans mass is M J ~ 10 3 M ☉ . The existence of these characteristic values has a robust explanation in the microphysics of H 2 cooling, connected to the minimum temperature that can be reached with the H 2 coolant, and to the critical density at which the transition takes place between levels being populated according to non-LTE (NLTE), and according to LTE. In all cases, the gas dissipatively settles into an irregular, central configuration that has a filamentary and knotty appearance. The fluid regions with the highest densities are the first to undergo runaway collapse due to gravitational instability, and to form clumps with initial masses ~10 3 M ☉ , close to the characteristic Jeans scale. These results suggest that the first stars might have been quite massive, possibly even very massive with M * ≳ 100 M ☉ . After a gas element has undergone runaway collapse, and has reached densities in excess of 10 8 cm -3 , a sink particle is created. This procedure allows us to follow the evolution of the overall system beyond the point where the first nonlinear region would otherwise force the calculation to a halt. These later evolutionary stages, during which the clumps grow in mass due to accretion and merging with other clumps, are quite sensitive to the initial conditions. The key process in building up very massive clumps, with masses up to a few times 10 4 M ☉ , is merging between clumps. Since the merging rate sensitively depends on the density of the gas, halos with the highest degree of central concentration are able to assemble the most massive clumps. Among these are halos with a low spin (λ ≃ 0.01), and with DM fluctuations imprinted according to a white-noise spectrum.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/323947

Cites

52 of 52 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Cited by

See all 1,078

Metadata

Authors
Bromm, V., Coppi, P. S., & Larson, R. B.
Venue
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Published
2002-01
Volume
564
Issue
1
Pages
23-51
ISSN
  • 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
  • 1538-4357
DOI
10.1086/323947
OpenAlex
W2079349557
Cited by
1,078
References
52
FWCI
40.20
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.