How can we finally see the first light? Status and perspective in the search for Population III stars

arXiv:2607.00167 · astro-ph.GA · Submitted 2026-08-19 · Read on arXiv

Alessandra Venditti, Daniel Schaerer, Erik Zackrisson, Yoshihisa Asada, Harley Katz, Stefania Salvadori, Eros Vanzella, Julian B. Muñoz, Anatole Storck, Andrew J. Bunker, Alessandro Trinca, Dirk Scholte, Fabio Pacucci, Pablo G. Pérez-González, Seiji Fujimoto, Corinne Charbonnel, Roberto Maiolino, Andrea Ferrara, Mauro Giavalisco, Raffaella Schneider, Josephine Baggen, Hakim Atek, Volker Bromm, Karina Caputi, Laure Ciesla, Pratika Dayal, Chiaki Kobayashi, Marco Castellano, Paola Santini

astro-ph.GA

Submitted: 2026-08-19

Updated: 2026-08-24

Comments: 27 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables. Proceeding of "The search for Pop III stars" session of the CSI: Sesto workshop, January 26-30 2026. Submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Finding the first (Population III or Pop III) stars is one of the fundamental quests of astronomy, aiming to deliver the missing link in how stars form at early cosmic times.

Terminology

Abstract

Finding the first (Population III or Pop III) stars is one of the fundamental quests of astronomy, aiming to deliver the missing link in how stars form at early cosmic times. Yet their initial mass function, formation sites and feedback remain highly uncertain, as well as the timing and topology of the transition to metal-enriched star formation. The observability of their peculiar spectral features is also debated, due to their short lifetime and faintness. This review summarizes current theoretical expectations for Pop III star formation, and the main observational strategies that have been adopted to constrain their properties across cosmic time, including near-field cosmology studies, direct searches for extremely metal-poor star-forming complexes and/or hard-ionizing spectral signatures at high and intermediate redshifts, and prospects for identifying Pop III activity up to Cosmic Dawn. The combination of JWST spectroscopy, time-domain searches, lensing surveys, stellar archaeology, absorption-line studies, as well as improved simulations, is yielding a growing number of observational candidates and narrowing the allowed parameter space for the first stars, setting the stage for a ``golden era'' of Pop III searches.

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