The mass distribution of Population III stars
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Extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars are uniquely informative on the nature of massive Population III stars. Modulo a few elements that vary with stellar evolution, the present-day photospheric abundances observed in EMP stars are representative of their natal gas cloud composition. For this reason, the chemistry of EMP stars closely reflects the nucleosynthetic yields of supernovae from massive Population III stars. Here we collate detailed abundances of 53 EMP stars from the literature and infer the masses of their Population III progenitors. We fit a simple initial mass function (IMF) to a subset of 29 of the inferred Population III star masses, and find that the mass distribution is well represented by a power-law IMF with exponent α = 2.35
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1365-2966