How did the metals in a giant star originate?

Abstract

The chemical composition of stars with extremely low metal contents (taking ``metals'' to mean all elements other than hydrogen and helium) provides us with information on the masses of the stars that produced the first metals. Such a direct connection is not possible, however, if the surface of the star has been polluted by enriched material, either dredged from the star's interior or transferred from a companion star. Here we argue that, in the case of HE0107-5240 (ref. 1), the most iron poor star known, the oxygen abundance could be a discriminant: a ratio of [O/Fe] exceeding +3.5 would favour a pristine origin of metals, whereas an [O/Fe] ratio of less than +3 would favour the pollution hypothesis. Using this criterion, we suggest how the required information on oxygen abundance might be obtained.

to appear in Nature Brief Communications issue 24 April 2003

References in corpus (1)

• A stellar relic from the early Milky Way

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Variations in the Abundance Pattern of Extremely Metal-poor Stars and Nucleosynthesis in Population III Supernovae
• TOPoS: II. On the bimodality of carbon abundance in CEMP stars. Implications on the early chemical evolution of galaxies
• First stars X. The nature of three unevolved Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor stars
• Limits on Pop III star formation with the most iron-poor stars
• On the origin of HE0107-5240, the most iron deficient star presently known
• On the oxygen abundance of HE0107-5240
• The mass spectrum of metal-free Stars resulting from photodissociation feedback: A scenario for the formation of low-mass population III stars
• Probing the existence of very massive first stars
• Supernova dust yields: the role of metallicity, rotation, and fallback
• Evolution and nucleosynthesis of primordial low mass stars
• A CEMP-no star in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Pisces II
• Oxygen and light element synthesis by neutron-capture reactions in metal-free and extremely metal-poor AGB stars
• Fates of the oldest intermediate-mass stars - Primordial to Extremely Metal-Poor AGB and Super-AGB Stars: White Dwarf or Supernova progenitors
• An upper limit on the sulphur abundance in HE 1327-2326
• Espresso observations of HE 0107$-$5240 and other CEMP-no stars with $[Fe/H]\le -4.5$
• Explaining the ${}^{12}\text{C}{/}^{13}\text{C}$ ratio in the Galactic halo: the contribution from shell mergers in primordial massive stars
• Telling the tale of the first stars