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Published Online June 2, 2005
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1112997

Reports

Submitted on March 31, 2005
Accepted on May 23, 2005

The First Chemical Enrichment in the Universe and the Formation of Hyper Metal-Poor Stars

Nobuyuki Iwamoto 1*, Hideyuki Umeda 2, Nozomu Tominaga 2, Ken'ichi Nomoto 2*, Keiichi Maeda 3

1 Nuclear Data Center, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, Ibaraki 319-1195, Japan.
2 Department of Astronomy, School of Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
3 Department of Earth Science and Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Ken'ichi Nomoto , E-mail: nomoto{at}astron.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

The recent discovery of a hyper metal-poor (HMP) star, whose metallicity Fe/H is smaller than 1/100,000 of the solar ratio, together with one earlier HMP star, has raised a challenging question if these HMP stars are the actual first generation, low mass stars in the Universe. We argue that these HMP stars are the second generation stars being formed from gases which were chemically enriched by the first generation supernovae. The key to this solution is the very unusual abundance patterns of these HMP stars with important similarities and differences. We can reproduce these abundance features with the core-collapse "faint" supernova models which undergo extensive matter mixing and fallback during the explosion.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Protostar Formation in the Early Universe.
N. Yoshida, K. Omukai, and L. Hernquist (2008)
Science 321, 669-671
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)