Extremely metal-poor stars in SDSS fields

Some insight on the first generation of stars can be obtained from the chemical composition of their direct descendants, extremely metal-poor stars (EMP), with metallicity less than or equal to 1/1000 of the solar metallicity. Such stars are exceedingly rare, the most successful surveys, for this purpose, have so far provided only about 100 stars with 1/1 000 the solar metallicity and 4 stars with about 1/10 000 of the solar metallicity. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has the potential to provide a large number of candidates of extremely low metallicity. X-shooter has the unique capability of performing the necessary follow-up spectroscopy providing accurate metallicities and abundance ratios for several elements (Mg, Al, Ca, Ti, Cr, Sr,...) for EMP candidates. We here report on the results for the first two stars observed in the course of our Franco-Italian X-shooter GTO. The two stars were targeted to be of metallicity around -3.0, the analysis of the X-shooter spectra showed them to be of metallicity around -2.0, but with a low a to iron ratio, which explains the underestimate of the metallicity from the SDSS spectra. The efficiency of X-shooter allows an in situ study of the outer halo, for the two stars studied here we estimate distances of 3.9 and 9.1 kpc, these are likely the most distant dwarf stars studied in detail to date. (C) 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH&Co. KGaA, Weinheim