Supernovae at the cosmic dawn

Abstract

Modern cosmological simulations predict that the first generation of stars formed with a mass scale around 100 solar masses about 300-400 million years after the Big Bang. When the first stars reached the end of their lives, many of them might have died as energetic supernovae that could have significantly affected the early Universe via injecting large amounts of energy and metals into the primordial intergalactic medium. In this paper, we review the current models of the first supernovae by discussing on the relevant background physics, computational methods, and the latest results.