Related papers: The Second Stars
Metal-poor stars hold the key to our understanding of the origin of the elements and the chemical evolution of the Universe. This chapter describes the process of discovery of these rare stars, the manner in which their surface abundances…
The oldest stars in the universe retain to a great extent detailed information on the chemical composition of the interstellar medium at the time of their birth. Hence the earliest phases of Galactic chemical evolution and nucleosynthesis…
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements…
Globular clusters contain many stars with surface abundance patterns indicating contributions from hydrogen burning products, as seen in the anti-correlated elemental abundances of e.g. sodium and oxygen, and magnesium and aluminium.…
Our current understanding of the chemical evolution of the Universe is that a first generation of stars was formed out of primordial material, completely devoid of metals (Pop III stars). This first population of stars comprised massive…
Ancient, long-lived stars remain present in all components of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Born a few hundred million after the Big Bang and during a time that marked the very beginning of the chemical evolution, these stars display very…
The study of the long-dead early generations of massive stars is crucial in order to obtain a complete picture of the chemical evolution of the Universe, hence the origin of the elements. The nature of these stars can be inferred indirectly…
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of cosmic chemical evolution. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements, and the…
The massive First Stars (the first ones to contribute to the chemical enrichment of the Universe due to their short lifetimes) are long dead, and even though efforts to directly observe them in high redshift galaxies are underway, a step…
S-type stars are late-type giants enhanced with s-process elements originating either from nucleosynthesis during the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) or from a pollution by a binary companion. The former are called intrinsic S stars, and the…
The chemical abundances of metal-poor stars provide a great deal of information regarding the individual nucleosynthetic processes that created the observed elements and the overall process of chemical enrichment of the galaxy since the…
Metal-poor stars provide the fossil record of Galactic chemical evolution and the nucleosynthesis processes that took place at the earliest times in the history of our Galaxy. From detailed abundance studies of low mass, extremely…
The earliest stars to form in the Universe were the first sources of light, heat and metals after the Big Bang. The products of their evolution will have had a profound impact on subsequent generations of stars. Recent studies of primordial…
Oxygen and carbon-rich AGB stars - and objects directly polluted by them - are excellent laboratories to investigate the nucleosynthesis and mixing processes occurring during the later phases of the of low- and intermediate-mass star…
Low-metallicity stars preserve the signatures of the first stellar nucleosynthesis events in the Galaxy, as their surface abundances reflect the composition of the interstellar medium from which they were born. Aside from primordial Big…
Several stars at the low-metallicity extreme of the Galactic halo ([Fe/H]=-2.5) show strong enhancements of both s-process and r-process elements. The presence of s-process elements in main-sequence stars is explained via mass transfer from…
Accurate relative abundances have been obtained for a sample of 21 mildly metal-poor stars from the analysis of high resolution and high signal-to-noise spectra. With these accurate results, correlations between relative abundances have…
The recent discovery of a hyper metal-poor (HMP) star, whose metallicity Fe/H is smaller than 1/100,000 of the solar ratio, together with one earlier HMP star, has raised a challenging question if these HMP stars are the actual first…
New measurements of neutron-capture elements are presented for two very metal-poor stars ([Fe/H] ~ -3). One (LP 625-44) has an s-process signature believed to be due to mass transfer from a now-extinct metal-poor AGB companion, and the…
The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to [Fe/H]\sim-5.5) are relics from the…