Homepage of Anna Frebel

Hello, welcome to my astronomy science page!

I am currently the W. J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow of the McDonald Observatory & Department of Astronomy of the University of Texas as Austin.

From January 2009, I will be the Clay Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambdridge, MA.

New:

I recently wrote a 9 page popular science article about the oldest stars (in German, sorry) that will appear in the September 2008 issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft. Check it out!

My primary research area is Galactic stellar astronomy:

I am interested in searching for the oldest stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. By studying these stars, we can learn details about the nature of the early Universe shortly after the Big Bang when the first stars and galaxies began to form. Employing the the worlds largest optical telescopes we identify old stars by means of their chemically primitive nature. These so-called "metal-poor" stars contain only tiny amounts of heavy elements ("metals") that are heavier than hydrogen and helium. They formed before the Universe was significantly enriched in chemical elements, as we know it today. Hence, the oldest stars in the Milky Way are stellar fossils and make possible to reconstruct the chemical evolution of the Galaxy from the earliest times until today.

A recent review on the metal-poor stars can be found here. It describes the role of metal-poor star with regard to the early universe, the most recent discoveries, and how these old objects help us to understand various nucleosynthesis processes in stars, the origin of the elements and the chemical evolution of the Galaxy.
This review is published in New Horizons in Astronomy: Frank N. Bash Symposium 2007 ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 393, eds. A. Frebel, J. R. Maund, J. Shen, and M. H. Siegel. San Francisco: ASP, 2008, 63

Another review on r-process enhanced stars such as HE 1523-0901 which allow the detailed study of neutron-capture processes in the cosmos can be found here. It will be published in the proceedings of the "Nuclei in the Cosmos X" symposium, 2008.

I completed my PhD thesis "Abundance Analysis of Bright Metal-Poor Stars from the Hamburg/ESO Survey" at the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics of the Australian National University located at Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia. I was supervised by John E. Norris (Australian Natl. Univ.), Mike S. Bessell (Australian Natl. Univ.), Martin Asplund (Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics) and Norbert Christlieb (Landessternwarte Heidelberg). If you would like to have a copy of my thesis, please send me an email (address is given below).

I received the 2007 Charlene Heisler Prize for the best PhD thesis in Astronomy, or a closely related field, accepted by an Australian university in 2006.

Projects I'm currently leading:

Chemical Abundance of Stars in the Halo (CASH) Project: A long-term project with the Hobby-Eberly-Telescope to discover metal-poor stars

Texas Stellar Archaeology Project: We use metal-poor stars to learn about the first chemical enrichments, the initial mass function, and the formation of the first low-mass objects in the Universe

Previous projects (among others):

In 2004, one of my stars turned out to be the most iron-poor star known to date!

Publications

My CV can be found here (.pdf)

The hunt for the most metal-poor star: A quick history

Collaborators:

N. Christlieb (Sweden), T.C. Beers (USA), W. Aoki (Japan), A. Korn (Sweden), and many others...

Our world leading team that finds the most metal-poor stars, at a scientific meeting in Paris, May 2005

left to right: W. Aoki (NAOJ), S. Ryan (Hertfordshire), M. Bessell (ANU), J. E. Norris (ANU),
M. Asplund (ANU), N. Christlieb (Heidelberg), T. Beers (MSU), A. Frebel (UT Austin)

Research Interest

Metal-poor stars, chemical abundances, abundance trends at the lowest metallicities, the r-process, chemical evolution of the Galaxy, formation of the halo, high-resolution spectroscopy, ... and much more

Postal address:

Anna Frebel
The University of Texas
McDonald Observatory
1 University Station, C1402
Austin, Texas 78712-0259
USA
ph: +1 512 471 9985
fax: +1 512 471 6016
email: anna& at& astro. as. utexas. edu

last updated: August 2008