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T.C. Beers (MSU)
High-resolution spectrographs on 8m-class telescopes will be prodigious consumers of photons generated by the most metal-deficient stars in the Galaxy, assuming they (the telescopes, not the photons) can be told where to look. I summarize the results of 20 years of the HK (originally referred to as the Preston-Shectman) survey effort, which has identified over 90% of all of the stars presently known with [Fe/H] < -2.5 (N ~350) , i.e., with metallicites less than the lowest abundance globular clusters. I then discuss a new, and far more efficient, approach to the discovery of extremely metal-poor stars, making use of the stellar component of the Hamburg/ESO Survey (HES) of the southern sky. A new, accelerated, survey effort based on 4m-class follow-up observations of candidate metal-poor stars from the HES should be able to identify ~1500 stars with [Fe/H] < -2.5 in three years time, and will be described in detail. If future users of HROS on Gemini South wish to have interesting (low-metallicity) targets to examine, NOW is the time to find them.
Partial support from the NSF, via grant AST95-29454, for recent work, is gratefully acknowledged. I would be pleased to acknowledge support from the NSF to carry out the future efforts described herein, should it be received.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: beers@pa.msu.edu