The HII region of a primordial star

The concordance model of cosmology and structure formation predicts the formation of isolated, very massive stars at high redshifts in dark matter-dominated halos of 10(-5)-10(6) M-circle dot . These stars photoionize their host primordial molecular clouds, expelling all the baryons from their halos. When the stars die, a relic H ii region is formed within which large amounts of molecular hydrogen form that will allow the gas to cool efficiently when gravity assembles it into larger dark matter halos. The filaments surrounding the first star-hosting halo are largely shielded and provide the pathway for gas to stream into the halo when the star has died. We present the first fully three-dimensional cosmological radiation hydrodynamical simulations that follow all these effects. A novel adaptive ray-casting technique incorporates the time-dependent radiative transfer around point sources. This approach is fast enough so that radiation transport, kinetic rate equations, and hydrodynamics are solved self-consistently. It retains the time derivative of the transfer equation and is explicitly photon-conserving. This method is integrated with the cosmological adaptive mesh refinement code Enzo and runs on distributed and shared memory parallel architectures. Where applicable, the three-dimensional calculation not only confirms expectations from earlier one-dimensional results but also illustrates the multifold hydrodynamic complexities of H ii regions. In the absence of stellar winds, the circumstellar environments of the first supernovae and putative early gamma-ray bursts will be of low density, similar to 1 cm(-3). Albeit marginally resolved, ionization front instabilities lead to cometary and elephant trunk-like small-scale structures reminiscent of nearby star-forming regions.