Stellar Signatures of Inhomogeneous Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Understand

We evaluate abundance anomalies generated in patches of the universe where the baryon-to-photon ratio was locally enhanced by possibly many orders of magnitude in the range $\eta = 10^{-10} - 10^{-1}$.

• Our study is motivated by the possible survival of rare dense regions in the early universe, the most extreme of which, above a critical threshold, collapsed to form primordial black holes.
• If this occurred, one may expect there to also be a significant population of early-forming stars that formed in similar but subthreshold patches.
• We derive a range of element abundance signatures by performing BBN simulations at high values of the baryon-to-photon ratio that may be detectable in any surviving first generation stars of around a solar mass.