Anna Frebel

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research field

Stellar archaeology, the oldest and most metal-poor stars

Anna Frebel searches the Milky Way and its dwarf galaxies for stars that formed in the first billion years after the Big Bang and measures their chemical composition. The most extreme of them have less than a ten-millionth of the Sun's iron and often a large excess of carbon, a pattern that records what the first supernovae produced. Some are rich in elements from the r process and have been dated at 13 to 14 billion years. The unit uses her review with John Norris to show how the nuclear processes of stellar interiors can be read in real stars.

In the masterclass

Section 7, after the s and r process, where the abundance patterns of the oldest stars are used as a record of the first nucleosynthesis.

The research is presented in Unit 9: Stellar Structure and Nuclear Fusion, in a research spotlight box that explains the result at the level of the unit and links it to the physics you have just learned.

The paper

Near-Field Cosmology with Extremely Metal-Poor Stars