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Black Holes of the First Stars

In this report, we constrain properties of foreground objects in the Milky Way that have the potential of being confused with accretion disks of Population III stellar- mass black holes at high redshift. Following Windhorst et al. (2018), a model for multicolour accretion disks of Population III stellar-mass black holes is presented. The resulting spectra are used to derive observable magnitudes with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Magnification of a factor 103 to 106, depending on the black hole mass, through gravitational lensing is necessary to surpass the JWST detection limit. Spectra of faint Milky Way objects of low-mass main sequence or pre-main sequence stars (Baraffe et al. 2015) and cool brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets (Phillips et al. 2020) were fitted to a distance such that their observable JWST magnitudes are similar to those of the accretion disk. We find that the spectral energy distributions that have the highest chances of being confused with high redshift Population III black hole accretion disks belong to pre-main sequence and low-mass main sequence stars of temperature 1500 K to 4200 K. At redshift 𝑧 = 7, accretion disks most closely resemble the spectral energy distributions of 2830 K Milky Way objects. Cool brown dwarfs or giant exoplanets with chemical equilibrium atmospheres at temperature ∼ 2700 K or chemical non-equilibrium atmospheres at ∼ 1790 K most closely resemble the spectral energy distribution of redshift 𝑧 = 7–8. Although the SEDs produce good fits, a confusion probability can sometimes be reduced because the models are very young (0.5 to 10 Myr) or have distances corresponding to the stellar halo (≳ 200 kpc).

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-483027
Date January 2022
CreatorsKordt, Aron
PublisherUppsala universitet, Institutionen för fysik och astronomi
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationFYSAST ; FYSPROJ1278

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