Talk Details

Thursday, October 18, 2007 - 1:30pm

Dr. Simon Glover (AIP):

"The Second Stars"

Abstract. The first generation of stars to form in the Universe -- the so-called population III -- is widely believed to have had an initial mass function (IMF) strongly biased towards high mass stars. The fact that we have yet to observe a truly metal-free star is consistent with this theoretical prediction. However, a number of stars with extremely low, but non-zero metallicity are known, suggesting that the IMF of even the earliest population II stars differed significantly from that of population III stars. In this talk, I review the history of the idea that it is the metal-enrichment of the gas that causes this change in the IMF, and present some new results from high resolution hydrodynamical simulations of early star formation that provide strong support for this hypothesis.