The Prompt Emission of Gamma-Ray Bursts from Population III Stars

Abstract

Population (Pop) III stars, the first generation of stars in the Universe, have eluded direct detection for decades. The advent of the James Webb Space Telescope, with its unprecedented sensitivity to high-redshift sources, has renewed interest in the prospects for identifying these primordial stars. While previous studies have explored the direct detection of Pop III stars through gravitational lensing, here we investigate an alternative approach: identifying Pop III stars through gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) produced by the deaths of massive Pop III progenitors. We generate source-frame mock observables and find that, although Pop III and Pop I GRBs share many common properties, several observables can potentially distinguish between the two populations. In particular, light-curve timescales, isotropic-equivalent energies, peak energies, and the locations of GRBs in empirical prompt-emission correlations depend sensitively on the mass and explosion energy of the progenitor. We find that Pop III GRBs tend to exhibit longer characteristic timescales and higher isotropic-equivalent peak energies than their Pop I counterparts. Finally, we show that Pop III GRBs may provide a promising origin for the population of soft X-ray prompt emission recently detected by the Einstein Probe, offering a complementary avenue for probing the first generations of stars.