Artículos de revistas
Probing the stellar initial mass function with high-z supernovae
Fecha
2014Registro en:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford, v. 442, p. 1640-1655, 2014
0035-8711
10.1093/mnras/stu984
Autor
Souza, Renata Soares de
Ishida, E. E. O.
Whalen, D. J.
Johnson, J. L.
Ferrara, A.
Institución
Resumen
The first supernovae (SNe) will soon be visible at the edge of the observable universe, revealing
the birthplaces of Population III stars. With upcoming near-infrared missions, a broad analysis
of the detectability of high-z SNe is paramount. We combine cosmological and radiation
transport simulations, instrument specifications and survey strategies to create synthetic observations
of primeval core-collapse (CC), Type IIn and pair-instability (PI) SNe with the James
Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We show that a dedicated observational campaign with the
JWST can detect up to ∼15 PI explosions, ∼300 CC SNe, but less than one Type IIn explosion
per year, depending on the Population III star formation history. Our synthetic survey also
shows that ≈1–2 × 102 SNe detections, depending on the accuracy of the classification, are
sufficient to discriminate between a Salpeter and flat mass distribution for high-redshift stars
with a confidence level greater than 99.5 per cent. We discuss how the purity of the sample
affects our results and how supervised learning methods may help to discriminate between CC
and PI SNe