Research Interests:

My research focuses on the birth of the Milky Way and the formation of the chemical elements in its oldest stars. I have undertaken programmes to discover the first generations of stars, which are 14 billion years old, and have studied their composition using some of the world's largest telescopes. The research has shown how the various elements we use on Earth were produced in successive generations of stars prior to being caught up in the gas cloud that eventually formed the Sun and planets. The observations also reveal the motions of the stars in the Galaxy. By studying the motions and their composition together, it is possible to tell what the Milky Way looked like when it was still forming, long before the Earth existed.

Formation of the Galaxy
Chemical evolution of the Galaxy
Synthesis of the elements
High-resolution spectroscopy
Stellar abundance analysis
Population II and III objects
Big bang nucleosynthesis
The early universe

Click here for a general summary.

Click here for an alternative version.

In case you're interested in reading more about these topics, you can download papers (in postscript or PDF format) below.
(If you're a non-specialist, try the conference publications first.)

Current PhD students:

Adam Hosford (University of Hertfordshire):  Precision spectroscopy of metal-deficient stars

Data in Refereed Papers:

Neutron capture elements in s-process-rich, very metal-poor stars (PDF 0.3MB)
Aoki, W., Ryan, S. G. Norris, J. E., Beers, T. C., Ando, H., Iwamoto, N., Kajino, T., Mathews, G. J., & Fujimoto, M. Y. 2001, ApJ, 561, 346-363
... and tables from appendices: A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6 (40kB total)

Extremely metal-poor stars. VIII. High-resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio analysis of five stars with [Fe/H] ~< -3.5 (PDF 0.8MB)
Table of literature abundances (ASCII 40kB)
Norris, J. E., Ryan, S. G., & Beers, T. C., 2001, ApJ, 561, 1034-1059