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.

Current Research students:

Liz Sibbons (PhD):  The AGB Population of NGC 6822

John Sharkey (MSc):  Halo Common Proper Motion 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

Notes from talks

Technical Writing [and where to find help](PDF 0.1MB)
Talk given at the STRI Careers Development Day, UH 20 June 2012
(If you use material from this talk, please give credit as appropriate.)