Looking for Population III stars with He II line intensity mapping

Understand

Constraining the properties of Population III (Pop III) stars will be very challenging because they reside in small galaxies at high redshift which will be difficult to directly detect.

• In this paper, we suggest that intensity mapping may be a promising method to study Pop III stars.
• Intensity mapping is a technique proposed to measure large-scale fluctuations of galaxy line emission in three dimensions without resolving individual sources.
• This technique is well suited for observing many faint galaxies because it can measure their cumulative emission even if they cannot be directly detected.