Halo Meteors

The stellar halo contains some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way galaxy and in the universe. The detections of ‘Oumuamua, CNEOS 2014-01-08, and interstellar dust serve to calibrate the production rate of interstellar objects. We study the feasibility of a search for interstellar meteors with origins in the stellar halo. We find the mean heliocentric impact speed for halo meteors to be $\sim 270\text{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1},$ and the standard deviation is $\sim 90\text{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1},$ making the population kinematically distinct from all other meteors, which are an order-of-magnitude slower. We explore the expected abundance of halo meteors, finding that a network of all-sky cameras covering all land on Earth can take spectra and determine the orbits of a few hundred halo meteors larger than a few mm per year. The compositions of halo meteors would provide information on the characteristics of planetary system formation for the oldest stars. In addition, one could place tight constraints on baryonic dark matter objects of low masses.     

Jet-driven AGN feedback in galaxy formation before black hole formation

We propose a scenario where during galaxy formation an active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback mechanism starts before the formation of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The supermassive star (SMS) progenitor of the SMBH accretes mass as it grows and launches jets. We simulate the evolution of SMSs and show that the escape velocity from their surface is $\approx \text{several}\times {10}^3\text{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1},$ with large uncertainties. We could not converge with the parameters of the evolutionary numerical code MESA to resolve the uncertainties for SMS evolution. Under the assumption that the jets carry about ten percent of the mass of the SMS, we show that the energy in the jets is a substantial fraction of the binding energy of the gas in the galaxy/bulge. Therefore, the jets that the SMS progenitor of the SMBH launches carry sufficient energy to establish a feedback cycle with the gas in the inner zone of the galaxy/bulge, and hence, set a relation between the total stellar mass and the mass of the SMS. As the SMS collapses to form the SMBH at the center, there is already a relation (correlation) between the newly born SMBH mass and the stellar mass of the galaxy/bulge. During the formation of the SMBH it rapidly accretes mass from the collapsing SMS and launches very energetic jets that might unbind most of the gas in the galaxy/bulge.