Abundance Profiling of Extremely Metal-Poor Stars and Supernova Properties in the Early Universe

Abstract

After the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the first heavy element enrichment in the Universe was made by a supernova (SN) explosion of a population (Pop) III star (Pop III SN). The abundance ratios of elements produced from Pop III SNe are recorded in abundance patterns of extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars. The observations of the increasing number of EMP stars have made it possible to statistically constrain the explosion properties of Pop III SNe. We present Pop III SN models whose nucleosynthesis yields well-reproduce individually the abundance patterns of 48 such metal-poor stars as [Fe/H] $\mathrel{\rlap{\lower 4pt \hbox{$\sim$}}\raise 1pt \hbox {$<$}}-3.5$. We then derive relations between the abundance ratios of EMP stars and certain explosion properties of Pop III SNe: the higher [(C+N)/Fe] and [(C+N)/Mg] ratios correspond to the smaller ejected Fe mass and the larger compact remnant mass, respectively. Using these relations, the distributions of the abundance ratios of EMP stars are converted to those of the explosion properties of Pop III SNe. Such distributions are compared with those of the explosion properties of present day SNe: The distribution of the ejected Fe mass of Pop III SNe has the same peak as that of the resent day SNe but shows an extended tail down to $\sim10^{-2}-10^{-5}M_\odot$, and the distribution of the mass of the compact remnant of Pop III SNe is as wide as that of the present day stellar-mass black holes. Our results demonstrate the importance of large samples of EMP stars obtained by ongoing and future EMP star surveys and subsequent high-dispersion spectroscopic observations in clarifying the nature of Pop III SNe in the early Universe.