2003/12/31 by Volker Bromm, Abraham Loeb · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.newast.2003.12.006
published as New Astron. 9 (2004) 353-364 · New Astronomy, in press, June 2004, vol.9, pp.353-364
openalex publication_date 2004/01/02 · arxiv created 2004/01/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a three-dimensional numerical simulation that resolves the formation process of a Population III star down to a scale of ~100 AU. The simulation is initialized on the scale of a dark matter halo of mass ~106 Msun that virializes at z~20. It then follows the formation of a fully-molecular central core, and traces the accretion from the diffuse dust-free cloud onto the protostellar core for as long as ~104 yr, at which time the core has grown to ~50 Msun. We find that the accretion rate starts very high, ~0.1 Msun yr-1, and declines rapidly thereafter approaching a power-law temporal scaling. Asymptotically, at times t > 103 yr after core formation, the stellar mass grows approximately as Mstar=20 Msun (t/103 yr)0.4. Earlier on, accretion is faster with Mstar ∝ t0.75. By extrapolating this growth over the full lifetime of very massive stars, t~3x106 yr, we obtain the conservative upper limit Mstar < 500 Msun. The actual stellar mass is, however, likely to be significantly smaller than this mass limit due to radiative and mechanical feedback from the protostar.