The effects of convection criteria on the evolution of Population III stars and the detectability of their supernovae

The first stars continue to elude modern telescopes, but much has been accomplished in observing the glow of the first galaxies. As detection capabilities improve we will eventually resolvethesegalaxies,buthopesofobservinganindividualstarremainsdimfortheforeseeable future. However, our first view of an individual first star may be possible due to its explosion. In this work, we present evolution calculations for Population III (Pop III) stars and their subsequentsupernovaeexplosions.Ourevolutionmodelsincludeamassrangeof15–100M� , each with initial heavy element abundance Z = 10 −14 . Our models are evolved from pre-main sequence through formation of an iron core, and thus near to core collapse. We find that modelling the evolution of these stars is very sensitive to the choice of convection criterion; here we provide evolution results using both the Schwarzschild and Ledoux criteria. We also use the final structure from our models for numerical simulation of their supernovae light curves using a radiation hydrodynamics code. In doing so, we estimate a lower bound of initial model mass that may be possible to observe in near future. We also find that our 40M� Schwarzschild evolution model produces the brightest supernova peak and statistically should