Pictures for press coverage of paper "Linking dwarf galaxies to
halo building blocks with the most metal-poor star in Sculptor"

By Frebel, Kirby & Simon 2010, Nature 464, 72 (March 4 issue).

The paper can be found here (Nature website).
The preprint can be found here (Arxiv: astro-ph/0912.4734).

The CfA press release can be found here

A collection of links to the international press coverage can be found here

A wonderful article SCIENCE "Unwinding the Milky Way" about my work and metal-poor stars (inlcuding the new Sculptor star) by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee can be found here

Authors contact details:

Anna Frebel, afrebel @# cfa dot harvard dot edu
Josh Simon, jsimon @# obs dot carnegiescience dot edu
Evan Kirby, enk @# astro dot caltech dot edu

Information about the star:

Location: The dwarf galaxy is named after its location in the constellation Sculptor.
Name: The stars' name "S1020549" stems from the original survey of Kirby et al. 2009.
Fact: The mass in iron in this stars is about the total mass of Mars or a tenth of the total mass of the Earth.
But the star is 10 million times bigger than Mars and one million times bigger that the Earth!
[If Mars was made from iron and you'd throw it into a hydrogen-helium gas ball a little smaller than the Sun, you'd made S1020549 :)]

Information about the Sculptor dwarf galaxy:

Sculptor dwarf galaxy: Wikipedia, Internet Encyclopedia of Science
Dwarf galaxies: Wikipedia

Click on right mouse button to view and save the image (=high-res. image).

Artist's conceptions of the extremely metal-poor red giant star S1020549
surrounded by other stars the Sculptor dwarf galaxy. Image credit: David Aguilar, CfA.

Astronomical image of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy. The position of the star S1020549 is indicated with an arrow. The extremely metal-poor star is located in the outskirts of this galaxy. Photo credit: Anglo-Australian Observatory and the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh (for Digitized Sky Survey images), additional image processing by E. Kirby.







Stellar light spectrum of the extremely heavy-element deficient star S1020549 of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy (bottom) in comparison with a spectrum of the Sun (top) and two other stars in dwarf galaxies (Ursa Major II and Coma Berenice). The differences in spectral line strengths reflects the strong deficiency of heavy elements in S1020549 compared with the Sun, a metal-rich stars. The background image is a star forming region, perhaps similar to the one from which S1020549 formed many billions of years ago.
[The numbers reflect the effective temperature of the stellar surface (e.g. 4550 degree Kelvin), the logarithm of the surface gravity of the star (e.g. 0.9) and a logarithmic measurement of the stellar iron abundance (e.g. -3.8, which is equal to 1/6300th of the solar iron abundance).]
Image credit: Background image of Cepheus B: X-ray [NASA/CXC/PSU/ K. Getman et al.]; IR [NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J. Wang et al.]; spectra: A. Frebel. Additional image processing: R. Fouche.

Stellar light spectrum of the extremely heavy-element deficient star S1020549 of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy (bottom) in comparison with a spectrum of the Sun (top). The differences in spectral line strengths reflects the strong depletion of heavy elements in S1020549 compared with the Sun, a metal-rich stars. Image credit: A. Frebel.



Stellar light spectrum of the extremely heavy-element deficient star S1020549 of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy (bottom) in comparison with a spectrum of the Sun (top) and two other stars in dwarf galaxies (Ursa Major II and Coma Berenice). The numbers reflect the effective temperature of the stellar surface (e.g. 4550 degree Kelvin), the logarithm of the surface gravity of the star (e.g. 0.9) and a logarithmic measurement of the stellar iron abundance (e.g. -3.8, which is equal to 1/6300th of the solar iron abundance). The differences in spectral line strengths reflects the strong deficiency of heavy elements in S1020549 compared with the Sun, a metal-rich stars. Image credit: A. Frebel.