FINDING THE FIRST COSMIC EXPLOSIONS. II. CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE

Understanding the properties of Population III (Pop III) stars is prerequisite to elucidating the nature of primeval galaxies, the chemical enrichment and reionization of the early intergalactic medium, and the origin of supermassive black holes. While the primordial initial mass function (IMF) remains unknown, recent evidence from numerical simulations and stellar archaeology suggests that some Pop III stars may have had lower masses than previously thought, 15-50 M☉ in addition to 50-500 M☉. The detection of Pop III supernovae (SNe) by JWST, WFIRST, or the TMT could directly probe the primordial IMF for the first time. We present numerical simulations of 15-40 M☉ Pop III core-collapse SNe performed with the Los Alamos radiation hydrodynamics code RAGE. We find that they will be visible in the earliest galaxies out to z ∼ 10-15, tracing their star formation rates and in some cases revealing their positions on the sky. Since the central engines of Pop III and solar-metallicity core-collapse SNe are quite similar, future detection of any Type II SNe by next-generation NIR instruments will in general be limited to this epoch.