Metal-Poor Stars and the Chemical Enrichment of the Universe

TL;DR

This paper reviews how studying metal-poor stars reveals insights into the universe's chemical evolution, early star formation, and galaxy development, highlighting recent discoveries and their implications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the methods and findings related to metal-poor stars, emphasizing their role in understanding cosmic history and galaxy formation.

Findings

Metal-poor stars inform about the universe's earliest nucleosynthesis.

Abundance patterns reveal the formation history of the Milky Way.

Recent discoveries of extremely metal-poor stars constrain galaxy assembly models.

Abstract

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 (produced in supernovae and other evolved stars) are determined from the analysis of their spectra, and the interpretation of their abundance patterns to elucidate questions of origin and evolution. More generally, studies of these stars contribute to other fundamental areas that include nuclear astrophysics, conditions at the earliest times, the nature of the first stars, and the formation and evolution of galaxies -- including our own Milky Way. We illustrate this with results from studies of lithium formed during the Big Bang; of stars dated to within ~1 Gyr of that event; of the most metal-poor stars, with abundance signatures very different from all other stars; and of the build-up of the elements over the first several Gyr. The combination of abundance and kinematic signatures constrains how the Milky Way formed, while recent discoveries of extremely metal-poor stars in the Milky Way's dwarf galaxy satellites constrain the hierarchical build-up of its stellar halo from small dark-matter dominated systems. [abridged]