Low-mass Population III Star Formation due to the HD Cooling Induced by Weak Lyman–Werner Radiation

Abstract

Lyman–Werner (LW) radiation photodissociating molecular hydrogen (H _2 ) influences the thermal and dynamical evolution of the Population III (Pop III) star-forming gas cloud. The effect of powerful LW radiation has been well investigated in the context of supermassive black hole formation in the early Universe. However, the average intensity in the early Universe is several orders of magnitude lower. For a comprehensive study, we investigate the effects of LW radiation at 18 different intensities, ranging from J _LW / J _21 = 0 (no radiation) to 30 (H-cooling cloud), on the primordial star-forming gas cloud obtained from a three-dimensional cosmological simulation. The overall trend with increasing radiation intensity is a gradual increase in the gas cloud temperature, consistent with previous works. Due to the HD cooling, however, the dependence of gas cloud temperature on J _LW deviates from the aforementioned increasing trend for a specific range of intensities ( J _LW / J _21 = 0.025–0.09). In HD-cooling clouds, the temperature remained below 200 K during 10 ^5 yr after the first formation of the high-density region, maintaining a low accretion rate. Finally, the HD-cooling clouds have only a low-mass dense core (above 10 ^8 cm ^−3 ) with about 1–16 M _⊙ , inside of which a low-mass Pop III star with ≤0.8 M _⊙ (a so-called “surviving star”) could form. The upper limit of star formation efficiency ${M}_{\mathrm{core}}/{M}_{\mathrm{vir},\mathrm{gas}}$ significantly decreases from 10 ^−3 to 10 ^−5 as HD cooling becomes effective. This tendency indicates that, whereas the total gas mass in the host halo increases with the LW radiation intensity, the total Pop III stellar mass does not increase similarly.

Keywords

• Hydrodynamical simulations
• Population III stars
• Star formation