Pith Number

pith:NPFCAWXL

pith:2026:NPFCAWXL5R3O43LIW7L3VRXRRM

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

What is Powering the Enigmatic He II Emitter Hebe: The First Stars or Black Holes?

Junehyoung Jeon, Saiyang Zhang, Tae Bong Jeong, Volker Bromm

The distant He II emitter Hebe is powered by a massive cluster of the universe's first stars, not a black hole.

arxiv:2604.19075 v2 · 2026-04-21 · astro-ph.GA · astro-ph.CO

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{NPFCAWXL5R3O43LIW7L3VRXRRM}

Prints a linked badge after your title and injects PDF metadata. Compiles on arXiv. Learn more · Embed verified badge

Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

We thus confirm the interpretation of Hebe as a remarkable, primordial object, with the most plausible power source provided by a massive cluster of Pop III stars, at the limit of what is allowed within the standard model of first star formation.

C2weakest assumption

The cosmological simulations of Pop III star cluster formation accurately capture the maximum stellar mass that can form at the location and redshift of Hebe, and the accreting SMBH continuum model parameters are appropriate without additional tuning.

C3one line summary

A cluster of Population III stars at the upper limit of standard formation models, rather than an accreting black hole, powers the He II emission in the primordial object Hebe.

Cited by

3 papers in Pith

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

JADES: the mass-metallicity relation at $z=1-10$. New calibrations, extremely metal-poor galaxies, and chemical diversity

NEFERTITI: Linking early galaxy formation to the assembly of the Milky Way

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-11T00:08:12.528720Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

6bca205aebec76ee6d68b7d7bac6f18b1ccd3dfefa4a61e773cfe56aa0b8b599

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.19075 · arxiv_version: 2604.19075v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.19075 · pith_short_12: NPFCAWXL5R3O · pith_short_16: NPFCAWXL5R3O43LI · pith_short_8: NPFCAWXL

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/NPFCAWXL5R3O43LIW7L3VRXRRM \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 6bca205aebec76ee6d68b7d7bac6f18b1ccd3dfefa4a61e773cfe56aa0b8b599

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "724d848efd22f886d92e6307cb2032d2c08adc37f828a2bdf4555c32c663ebf8",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.CO"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.GA",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-21T04:35:24Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "be18aa3b00480e61ba1d49d73856b53c370c084e76e02d04e4b1047021adf1da"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.19075",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}