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Metal-poor stars can provide important diagnostics on the masses and nucleosynthetic yields from the first generation of stars, the universality of the initial mass function, and on the early formation stages of galaxies. However, these are rare stars and have required special techniques to find them, ranging from narrow-band photometry (e.g., SkyMapper and Pristine) to blind spectroscopic surveys (e.g., SDSS and LAMOST). Several hundred metal-poor stars are now known in the Galactic halo and nearby dwarf galaxies, and we are starting to uncover these objects in the Galactic disk and bulge, the latter being the preferred location for the formation of the first stars. I will discuss some of the recent highlights from the search for and analyses of the most metal-poor stars, particularly from the Pristine survey team. These results range from carbon-enhancements, binary fractions, and r-process element abundances, to some of the unexpected kinematics found in their Gaia DR2 data. |
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