Near-pristine gas at high redshifts: a window on early nucleosynthesis

Abstract

It has now become recognised that damped Lyman alpha systems play an important role in helping us unravel the origin of chemical elements. In this presentation, we describe the main results of a recently completed survey of the most metal-poor DLAs, aimed at complementing and extending studies of the oldest stars in the Galaxy. The survey has clarified a number of lingering issues concerning the abundances of C, N, O in the low metallicity regime, has revealed the existence of DLA analogues to Carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars, and is providing some of the most precise measures of the primordial abundance of Deuterium.

11 pages, 7 Figures. Invited presentation at the XII International Symposium on Nuclei in the Cosmos, Cairns, Australia, 5-10 August 2012. To appear in Proceedings of Science

References in corpus (2)

• C, N, O Abundances in the Most Metal-Poor Damped Lyman alpha Systems
• A new, precise measurement of the primordial abundance of Deuterium

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Tracing the Cosmic Metal Evolution in the Low-Redshift Intergalactic Medium
• The explosion energy of early stellar populations: The Fe-peak element ratios in low metallicity damped Lyman-alpha systems