Stefano Bovino - March 11, 2016

Modelling the microphysics in low-metallicity star-forming regions

Understanding how metal poor stars were formed is of fundamental
importance to probe the chemical and physical conditions of primordial
stars, and contributes to improve our knowledge on the transition
between the first (PopIII) and the second (PopII) generation of stars
in the Universe. Compared to the formation of Pop III stars, where the
chemistry is simple, for the second generation of stars the presence
of dust, metals, and feedback adds complexity which results in a high
computational cost and large uncertainties. An accurate treatment of
the dust and metal physics is needed. We have employed the
astrochemistry package KROME coupled with the hydrodynamical code ENZO
to explore the conditions under which such stars were formed. In this
talk I will present results from recent simulations of low-metallicity
star-forming regions and discuss the effects of the grain size
distribution on the thermal evolution and the dynamical properties of
the collapsing haloes.