Jason Tumlinson
Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Yale University

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The First Stars

Recently a great deal of interest has built around the "first stars", the first generation of stars in the universe that initiated cosmic reionization and chemical enrichment. These stars are believed to be metal-free, which gives them many unique properties.

• My first, and still most highly cited, paper on this topic is "Zero-metallicity Stars and the Reionization of the Intergalactic Medium", written with Mike Shull (ApJ, 528, L65).
• The second paper predicted the He II emission line fluxes from the first stars: Tumlinson, Giroux, & Shull, "Probing the First Stars with Hydrogen and Helium Recombination Emission" 2000, ApJ, 550, L1, ApJ, 550, L1
• We then published full evolution tracks (Tumlinson, Shull, and Venkatesan 2003) and reionization models incorporating metal-free stars ( Venkatesan, Tumlinson, and Shull 2003). In this latter paper we found that there may in fact be an early epoch of He II reionization triggered by metal-free star formation. Uncompressed figures from TSV03 here: Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10
• We then published full evolution tracks (Tumlinson, Shull, and Venkatesan 2003) and reionization models incorporating metal-free stars ( Venkatesan, Tumlinson, and Shull 2003). In this latter paper we found that there may in fact be an early epoch of He II reionization triggered by metal-free star formation. Uncompressed figures from TSV03 here: Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10
• Since then I have worked to integrate chemical evolution and observational studies of metal-poor stars in the Galaxy into this picture, starting with Tumlinson, Venkatesan, & Shull (2004).
• My most recent work attempts to pull everything together - the first stars IMF, reionization, and Galactic chemical evolution, in a single model. See Tumlinson (2005) for more details. Uncompressed EPS figures here: Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3a Figure 3b Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9a Figure 9b Figure 10 Figure 11
• We were fortunate to get some press for our work at the Denver AAS meeting in June 2004. Here are the press release figures -  the high-resolution TIFF (11MB) High-quality JPEG (2MB) Medium-quality JPEG (340K)