Kindling the First Stars: I. Dependence of Detectability of the First Stars with JWST on the Pop III Stellar Masses

Understand

The first Pop III stars formed out of primordial, metal free gas, in minihalos at z>20, and kickstarted the cosmic processes of reionizaton and enrichment.

• While these stars are likely more massive than their enriched counterparts, the current unknowns of their astrophysics include; when the first Pop III stars ignited, how massive they were, and when and how the era of the first stars ended.
• Investigating these questions requires an exploration of a multi-dimensional parameter space, including the slope of the Pop III stellar initial mass function (IMF) and the strength of the non-ionizing UV background.
• In this work, we present a novel model which treats both the slope and maximum mass of Pop III stars as truly free parameters while including the physics of the fragmentation of primordial gas.