Primordial Molecular Emission in Population III Galaxies

Abstract

We study formation of molecules in primordial prestellar clumps and evaluate the line luminosities to assess detectability by next-generation facilities. If the initial H_2 fraction is sufficiently high, HD becomes an important coolant in the clumps. The luminosity from such HD cooling clumps is lower than that from H_2 cooling ones because of lower temperature (<100K). As for Li reactions, we include the three-body LiH formation approximately. The Li molecular fraction remains very low (<10^{-3}) throughout the evolution owing to the high dissociative reaction rate of LiH +H -> Li + H_2. LiH does not become an important coolant in any density range. The luminous emission lines from the prestellar cores include H_2 rovibrational lines: 1-0 Q(1), 1-0 O(3), 1-0 O(5), and pure rotational lines: 0-0 S(3), 0-0 S(4), 0-0 S(5). The next-generation facilities SPICA and JWST are able to detect H_2 emission in a large pre-galactic cloud that forms metal-free stars at a high rate of \sim 10^3 M_s/yr at redshift z<10. We also derive an analytical expression for the luminosity that reproduces the numerical results.