From Primordial Stars to Early Galaxies: A Semi-Analytic Model Calibrated with Aeos and Renaissance

Abstract

We present an extension of our semi-analytic model that follows the formation of Population III stars and their metal-enriched descendants, incorporating dark matter halo merger trees from cosmological $N$-body simulations and feedback from reionization. Our extended model is calibrated using two complementary cosmological hydrodynamical simulations: Aeos, which resolves individual Population III and II stars to $z\sim14.6$, and Renaissance, which is lower resolution but follows large-scale metal-enriched star formation to $z \sim 11$. With a combined calibration, we capture small-scale physics of primordial star formation over a large range in halo mass. We find good agreement between our calibrated model and Aeos, reproducing the evolution in number of star-forming halos and total stellar mass. Achieving this agreement requires increasing the normalization of, flattening the redshift dependence of, and adding scatter to the commonly used critical mass threshold $M_{\mathrm{crit}}$. Our treatment of the delay between Pop III stellar death and subsequent Pop II star formation emphasizes the need to account for halos that have yet to transition to Pop II, since incomplete sampling of this delay in simulations limits physically motivated calibrations. Finally, we apply our model to larger-volume dark matter only simulations and predict $\sim10$ active Pop III sources at $z = 10$ lie within the area strongly lensed by galaxy cluster MACS J0416 with a magnification exceeding $\mu > 30$. These results demonstrate that semi-analytic approaches, when calibrated to hydrodynamical simulations, can provide accurate, computationally efficient predictions for the earliest stages of cosmic star formation.