University of Heidelberg
Galactic Archaeology

The Galactic Archaeology group

News

23-Nov-11 Jing Ren has published her first refereed paper: "The Hamburg/ESO R-process Enhanced Star survey (HERES). VII. Thorium abundances in metal-poor stars", get the PDF of the preprint here.. Congratulations, Jing!

12-Sep-11 Today, Nikolay Kacharov started his PhD with our group. He will work on chemical analysis of stars in Globular Clusters, supervised by Andreas Koch. Welcome to Heidelberg, the ZAH, the Landessternwarte, and in our group, Nikolay!

01-Sep-11 Elisabetta has published a striking result on the extremely metal-poor, low-mass star SDSS J102915+172927 in a Letter to Nature, see also the News page of the ZAH. Simone Zaggia, one of the Letter's co-authors, created a nice animation (50 Mb!) showing how the star is moving within the Milky Way.

For olds (=old news), check out our news archive.

The paper list for this semester Journal Club is here. the schedule is here

Projects

The Galactic Archaeology Group at Landessternwarte Heidelberg is concerned with the search for the most metal-poor and hence oldest stars of the Galaxy, and the determination of their chemical abundance patterns.
These stars are important tools for studying, e.g., the formation and chemical evolution of the Galaxy, the properties (e.g., mass, rotation) of the first generation of massive stars which exploded as type II supernovae and nucleosynthesis processes that occurred in them. For a recent review of the field see Beers & Christlieb (2005, ARA&A 43, 531)

We are involved in the following survey projects:

  • The Hamburg/ESO objective-prism survey (HES) The search for metal-poor stars in the HES is lead by Norbert Christlieb. The current record holders for the most heavy-element deficient stars known, HE 1327-2326 and HE 0107-5240 were both found in the HES. This project is now reaching completion.
  • A new spectroscopic wide-angle survey for metal-poor stars in the northern hemisphere using the Chinese 4m LAMOST survey telescope. P.I.'s are Gang Zhao and Norbert Christlieb.
  • A photometric survey for metal-poor stars in the southern hemisphere based on the data to be collected with the SkyMapper telescope. This effort is lead by Stefan Keller.
High-resolution spectroscopy of confirmed metal-poor stars is obtained with VLT (UVES), Keck I (HIRES), Subaru (HDS), Magellan (MIKE). We use MARCS model atmospheres calculated in Uppsala and 3D hydrodynmical model atmospheres calculated by us for the determination of the abundance patterns of the stars. We compare these patterns with nucleosynthesis calculations done in our group and in collaboration with colleagues in Mainz and elsewhere.

Members and associated members of the group


Image of Timothy Beers Image of Elisabetta Caffau Image of Seyma Caliskan Image of Norbert Christlieb
Tim Beers Elisabetta Caffau Seyma Caliskan Norbert "Animal" Christlieb
Humboldt Awardee Gliese Fellow PhD student Drum battle combatant
Metal-poor stars Abundance analysis of cool stars Abundance analysis of Palomar 14 STAAARS!!! HAHAHAAA!!

Image of Wenyuan Cui Image of Camilla Hansen Image of Terese Hansen Image of Johannes Iloff
Wenyuan Cui Camilla Hansen Terese Hansen Johannes Iloff
Visiting postdoc Postdoc (SFB 881) PhD student Diploma student
Abundance patterns of r+s stars Spectroscopy and abundance analysis of cool stars Spectroscopy and abundance analysis of extremely metal poor stars Analysis of medium-resolution spectra of candidate metal-poor stars

Image of Nikolay Kacharov Image of Andreas Koch Image of Hans Ludwig Image of Jing Ren
Andreas Koch Nikolay Kacharov Hans Ludwig Jing Ren
PhD student Emmy-Noether-Research Group leader Senior postdoc PhD student
Abundances in globular clusters Formation histories of galactic halos Stellar atmospheres Metal-poor stars pre-enriched by PISN
Image of Luca Sbordone Image of Hoda Shariati Image of Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay Image of Barbara Wright
Luca Sbordone Hoda Shariati Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay Barbara Wright
Postdoc (SFB 881; from 15 June 2011) Master Student Humboldt Fellow Admininstrative Assistant
Metal-poor stars Follow-up observations of candidate metal-poor stars Stellar atmospheres and white dwarfs

Publications

Please see ADS or ArXiv.

Suggestions for Diploma theses

  • Selection of candidates for metal-poor outer halo stars in the HES, using kinematic information. The thesis work might include own follow-up observations in Chile or Australia.
  • Homogeneous analysis of about 10,000 follow-up spectra of candidate metal-poor stars from the HES. The thesis work might include own follow-up observations in Chile or Australia.
  • Development of automated spectral classification of medium-resolution LAMOST spectra.
  • Development of methods for stellar parameter determination based on LAMOST spectra and SDSS photometry.
  • Development of automated abundance analysis methods to be applied to SDSS spectra.

    • Teaching

    See also Norbert's PIzzA Night talk (SS08), here (PDF, 6.1 MB). For more information, please contact N.Christlieb (at) lsw.uni-heidelberg.de.
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