Related papers: The Second Stars
The nature of the first generation of stars in the Universe remains largely unknown. Observations imply the existence of massive primordial stars early in the history of the universe, and the standard theory for the growth of cosmic…
A large sample of carbon enhanced metal-poor stars enriched in s-process elements (CEMP-s) have been observed in the Galactic halo. These stars of low mass (M ~ 0.9 Msun) are located on the main-sequence or the red giant phase, and do not…
Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a…
The cosmic microwave background and the cosmic expansion can be interpreted as evidence that the Universe underwent an extremely hot and dense phase about 14 Gyr ago. The nucleosynthesis computations tell us that the Universe emerged from…
Barium (Ba) stars are chemically peculiar stars that show enhanced surface abundances of heavy elements produced by the slow-neutron-capture process, the so-called s-process. These stars are not sufficiently evolved to undergo the s-process…
The external pollution of the first stars in the Galaxy is investigated. The first stars were born in clouds composed of the pristine gas without heavy elements. These stars accreted gas polluted with heavy elements while they still…
The chemical elements are created in nuclear fusion processes in the hot and dense cores of stars. The energy generated through nucleosynthesis allows stars to shine for billions of years. When these stars explode as massive supernovae, the…
Extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars in the Milky Way (MW) allow us to infer the properties of their progenitors by comparing their chemical composition to the metal yields of the first supernovae. This method is most powerful when applied to…
Initial conditions are set by Big bang nucleosynthesis from which we know that 90 per cent of baryons are dark and have essentially unknown chemical composition. In our own Galaxy, there are many clues from individual stars in different…
CEMP-s stars are very metal-poor stars with enhanced abundances of carbon and s-process elements. They form a significant proportion of the very metal-poor stars in the Galactic halo and are mostly observed in binary systems. This suggests…
The chemical abundances of metal-poor stars are an excellent test bed by which to set new constraints on models of neutron-capture processes at low metallicity. Some r-process-rich (hereafter r-rich) metal-poor stars, such as HD221170, show…
Compilations of abundances of Strontium and Barium in extremely metal-poor stars show that an apparent cutoff is observed for [Sr/Ba] at [Fe/H]$<$-3.6 and large fluctuations for [Fe/H]$>$-3.6 with a clear upper bound depending on…
Half or more of stars more massive than our Sun are orbited by a companion star in a binary system. Many binaries have short enough orbits that the evolution of both stars is greatly altered by an exchange of mass and angular momentum…
Stars are mostly found in binary and multiple systems, as at least 50% of all solar-like stars have companions - a fraction that goes up to 100% for the most massive stars. Moreover, a large fraction of them will interact in some way or…
The s-enhanced and very metal-poor star CS 30322-023 shows a puzzling abundance pattern of the neutron-capture elements, i.e. several neutron-capture elements such as Ba, Pb etc. show enhancement, but other neutron-capture elements such as…
Many observed CEMP stars are found in binary systems and show enhanced abundances of $s$-elements. The origin of the chemical abundances of these CEMP-$s$ stars is believed to be accretion in the past of enriched material from a primary…
Barium (Ba) stars help to verify asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star nucleosynthesis models since they experienced pollution from an AGB binary companion and thus their spectra carry the signatures of the slow neutron capture process (s…
The first stars in the Universe are predicted to have been much more massive than the Sun. Gravitational condensation accompanied by cooling of the primordial gas due to molecular hydrogen, yields a minimum fragmentation scale of a few…
The chemical evolution of the Universe is governed by the chemical yields from stars, which in turn is determined primarily by the initial stellar mass. Even stars as low as 0.9Msun can, at low metallicity, contribute to the chemical…
We review recent theoretical results on the formation of the first stars in the universe, and emphasize related open questions. In particular, we discuss the initial conditions for Population III star formation, as given by variants of the…