Enigmatic first stars and where to find them


IFPU
May 15 – 19, 2023


We know very few of the first stars: they had to be of pristine composition and quite massive. We don’t expect to see them in the local Universe, but we can still look for their nucleosynthetic signatures in very metal poor stars of low mass that have survived in the halo of our Galaxy or in close-by dwarf ones, or in metal poor gas clumps observed in absorption in the spectrum of high-redshift background sources. The launch of the James Webb telescope has opened a new window on the search for the first stellar objects, with the hope to directly detect their formation sites at very high redshift. This program gathers representatives of the different communities to share the expertise and find synergies and complementarities. The final goal is to develop a common path to combine information from the different observational techniques and from models to finally reach a comprehensive picture of the first stars.

Reference webpage: to be added soon.

Scientific organizers:

  • Valentina D’Odorico (INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste)
  • Gabriele Cescutti (University of Trieste)
  • Paolo Molaro (INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste)
  • Stefania Salvadori (University of Firenze)