Extremely metal-poor stars in SDSS fields

TL;DR

This study uses the X-Shooter spectrograph to analyze extremely metal-poor stars identified in SDSS fields, revealing their detailed chemical compositions and distances, and demonstrating the instrument's effectiveness for studying distant, ancient stars.

Contribution

First detailed spectroscopic analysis of EMP stars from SDSS using X-Shooter, providing accurate metallicities and chemical abundances for distant halo stars.

Findings

Stars initially estimated at [Fe/H] ~ -3.0 are actually around -2.0.

Low alpha to iron ratios explain SDSS metallicity underestimates.

X-Shooter enables detailed study of distant halo stars.

Abstract

Some insight on the first generation of stars can be obtained from the chemical composition of their direct descendants, extremely metal-poor stars (EMP), with metallicity less than or equal to 1/1000 of the solar metalllicity. Such stars are exceedingly rare, the most successful surveys, for this purpose, have so far provided only about 100 stars with 1/1000 the solar metallicity and 4 stars with about 1/10000 of the solar metallicity. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has the potential to provide a large number of candidates of extremely low metallicity. X-Shooter has the unique capability of performing the necessary follow-up spectroscopy providing accurate metallicities and abundance ratios for several elements (Mg, Al, Ca, Ti, Cr, Sr,...) for EMP candidates. We here report on the results for the first two stars observed in the course of our franco-italian X-Shooter GTO. The two stars were targeted to be of metallicity around -3.0, the analysis of the X-Shooter spectra showed them to be of metallicity around -2.0, but with a low alpha to iron ratio, which explains the underestimate of the metallicity from the SDSS spectra. The efficiency of X-Shooter allows an in situ study of the outer Halo, for the two stars studied here we estimate distances of 3.9 and 9.1 Kpc, these are likely the most distant dwarf stars studied in detail to date.