[Physicist]

The penalty, of course, to assuming super-heavy stars very early in the universe is that you generate black holes (after the supernova) that tend to recapture the ejected material.

A black hole has no more ability to recapture the ejecta than any other body of the same mass. The gravitational field is the same outside of the radius of the pre-collapse core.

Alternate: If the superstar dust cloud mass is enough to form a black hole, and the dust cloud collapse time is as short as indicated above (< 3/4 million years) then what would prevent the black hole from forming before or during stellar evolution: at a period when all of its material would go down the hole and none be available for ejection?

Newton's laws. When the core collapses, all of that gravitational potential energy is released. It can't all just "fall down the hole". Now remember, that energy is ALL being released within the center of the star, and it is going to be imparted to the surrounding mantle.

Now think about this: the thermal heat of the star, prior to core collapse, was enough to support the mantle. It wasn't falling into the core, except perhaps slowly. In a few tens of milliseconds, that energy density is exceeded by tens of orders of magnitude, and you expect the mantle to fall inwards?

That's not to say that supermassive black holes didn't form in this period. They did. There are trillions of galaxies in our Hubble volume, and many contain million-solar-mass black holes at their cores. So there might be a trillion of those within causal reach. Wow!

We still would assume that the time, heat and pressure to go from first fusion (H + H and H - D, etc) to second generation fusion ... up to the final layer is not enough to overcome the black hole limits of gravity and distance.

I didn't understand that.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Yeah - I erred.

I was thinking ahead of the problem, and got my thoughts fluxed up.

Regardless of how much mass in present, until that mass is concentrated so the escape velocity is irrelevant during any period of the first generation star until after it collapses, after the supernova.

Assume a star 10x the mass of the sun is first generation: It condenses, begins fusion, then goes through a lifecycle until the inner core is creating iron. If it goes supernova, the mass remaining in the center will be (almost certainly) to be within the Schwarzschild radius and lost to future generations, but as Phys. pointed out, that core mass is about 1/10 the mass of the original dust.

The remaining 90% of the original mass is ejected, ready for recycling. An open question is how much of that 90% that is ejected is "heavy" elements, and how much is unreacted H and He.