English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The emergence of the first, so-called Population III (Pop III), stars shapedearly cosmic history in ways that crucially depends on their initial massfunction (IMF). However, because of the absence of direct observationalconstraints, the detailed IMF remains elusive. Nevertheless, numericalsimulations agree in broad terms that the first stars were typically massiveand should often end their lives in violent, explosive deaths. These fatesinclude extremely luminous pair-instability supernovae (PISNe) and brightgamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the latter arising from the collapse of rapidlyrotating progenitor stars into black holes. These high-redshift transients areexpected to be within the detection limits of upcoming space telescopemissions, allowing to place effective constraints on the shape of theprimordial IMF that is not easily accessible with other probes. This paperpresents a framework to probe the Pop III IMF, utilizing the cosmologicalsource densities of high-redshift PISNe and GRBs. Considering these transientsseparately could provide useful constraints on the Pop III IMF, but tighterbounds are obtainable by combining PISN and GRB counts. This combineddiagnostic is more robust as it is independent of the underlying Pop III starformation rate density, an unknown prior. Future surveys promise to capturemost high-redshift GRBs across the entire sky, but high-redshift PISN searcheswith future telescopes, e.g. Roman Space Telescope, will likely besubstantially incomplete. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that even such lowerbounds on the PISN count will be able to provide key constraints on theprimordial IMF, in particular, if it is top-heavy or not.

Probing the initial mass function of the first stars with transients