Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 369, Issue 3, Pages 1437-1444Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.10391.x
Keywords
stars : formation; supernovae : general; galaxies : evolution; galaxies : stellar content; cosmology : theory; ISM : abundances; dust, extinction
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The thermal and fragmentation properties of star forming clouds have important consequences on the corresponding characteristic stellar mass. The initial composition of the gas within these clouds is a record of the nucleosynthetic products of previous stellar generations. In this paper, we present a model for the evolution of star forming clouds enriched by metals and dust from the first supernovae (SNe), resulting from the explosions of metal-free progenitors with masses in the range 12-30M(circle dot) and 140-260M(circle dot). Using a self-consistent approach, we show that: (i) metals depleted on to dust grains play a fundamental role, enabling fragmentation to solar or subsolar mass scales already at metallicities Z(cr) = 10(-6) Z(circle dot); (ii) even at metallicities as high as 10(-2) Z(circle dot), metals diffused in the gas phase lead to fragment mass scales which are greater than or similar to 100M(circle dot); (iii) C atoms are strongly depleted on to amorphous carbon grains and CO molecules so that CII plays a minor role in gas cooling, leaving OI as the main gas-phase cooling agent in low-metallicity clouds. These conclusions hold independently of the assumed SN progenitors and suggest that the onset of low-mass star formation is conditioned to the presence of dust in the parent clouds.
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