Seminar: Tracing the Early Milky Way through Spectroscopy of Metal-Poor Stars

As some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way, metal-poor stars provide valuable insights into the galaxy’s earliest stages and the Universe’s first stars. Leveraging Gaia DR3, we expanded the metal-poor star sample by observing ~6000 stars near the Galactic plane with 2dF+AAOmega, then performed detailed chemical analyses on 16 of these stars using the X-Shooter spectrograph. Here, I will discuss our key findings from both studies, include observational evidence of the Galactic disk’s spin-up, and two metal-poor stars displaying chemical abundances never seen before, underscoring the remarkable diversity present in early stellar populations.