Finding the Most Metal-poor Stars of the Galactic Halo with the Hamburg/ESO Objective-Prism Survey

Abstract

I review the status of the search for extremely metal-poor halo stars with the Hamburg/ESO objective-prism survey (HES). 2194 candidate metal-poor turn-off stars and 6133 giants in the magnitude range 14 < B < 17.5 have been selected from 329 (out of 380) HES fields, covering an effective area of 6400 square degrees in the southern extragalactic sky. Moderate-resolution follow-up observations for 3200 candidates have been obtained so far, and ~200 new stars with [Fe/H] <- 3.0 have been found, which trebles the total number of such extremely low-metallicity stars identified by all previous surveys. We use VLT-UT2/UVES, Keck/HIRES, Subaru/HDS, TNG/SARG, and Magellan/MIKE for high-resolution spectroscopy of HES metal-poor stars. I provide an overview of the scientific aims of these programs, and highlight several recent results.