The formation of the primitive star SDSS J102915+172927: effect of the dust mass and the grain-size distribution

Abstract

Understanding the formation of the extremely metal poor star SDSS-J102915+172927 is of fundamental importance to improve our knowledge on the transition between the first and second generation of stars in the Universe. In this paper, we perform three-dimensional cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of dust-enriched halos during the early stages of the collapse process including a detailed treatment of the dust physics. We employ the astrochemistry package \krome coupled with the hydrodynamical code \textsc{enzo} assuming grain size distributions produced by the explosion of core-collapse supernovae of 20 and 35 M$_\odot$ primordial stars which are suitable to reproduce the chemical pattern of the SDSS-J102915+172927 star. We find that the dust mass yield produced from Population III supernovae explosions is the most important factor which drives the thermal evolution and the dynamical properties of the halos. Hence, for the specific distributions relevant in this context, the composition, the dust optical properties, and the size-range have only minor effects on the results due to similar cooling functions. We also show that the critical dust mass to enable fragmentation provided by semi-analytical models should be revised, as we obtain values one order of magnitude larger. This determines the transition from disk fragmentation to a more filamentary fragmentation mode, and suggests that likely more than one single supernova event or efficient dust growth should be invoked to get such a high dust content.