Chemical signatures of the first stars

Abstract: The first stars are something many scientists are curious about. How did they formand how did the universe look like at that time? These stars however probably died along time ago, or are at a distance too far away from us to be observable. If these starsexploded and formed supernovae there might be stars observable today that formed fromthe ejecta of these supernovae. Models of nucleosynthesis in the first stars may potentiallybe used to infer parameters of progenitor supernovae from chemical abundances in old,metal-poor stars. This thesis aim is to find out how precise these abundances need to beto achieve a certain precision in the supernova parameters. This is done by perturbingthe abundances for one element at a time in four different stars and see how the recoveredsupernova parameters change. The first conclusion is that it isn’t necessarily the sameelements that are important for determining the supernova parameters in all stars, andif there is one thing that decides which elements are important it would be the star’smetallicity. The stars HE1327-2326 and HE0107-5240 metallicites are close to each other,with [Fe/H] < -5.0 and [Fe/H] = -5.3 respectively, and behaved similarly, the elementmost important in both stars was nitrogen. The star SMSS0313-6708, [Fe/H] < -7.3, hadmore elements that changed the parameters, the most important beeing C, O and Ca.The star CS 31028-001, [Fe/H] = -2.9, also had many elements that were important, andsome of them are Na, K and Ni.