Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Observations

This paper discusses the status of observations of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. The first detections of primary anisotropies in the CMB, achieved about 10 years ago, boosted a large number of ground-based and balloon-borne experiments that have delineated the CMB angular power spectrum up to spherical harmonic multipole l1000. A wealth of information on cosmological parameters is being revealed by these measurements. Very recently, the positions and amplitudes of the first and second peak in the power spectrum have been determined providing strong support to inflationary models with adiabatic primordial density perturbations. A total density equal to the critical value, and baryonic density consistent with Big Bang nucleosynthesis are the first results emerging from the current CMB data. Future experiments on ground (mainly interferometers), in balloons and from space (MAP and Planck missions) have the potential to constrain more than 10 cosmological parameters with high precision.     

The Low Metallicity Tail of the Halo Metallicity Distribution Function

Ongoing spectroscopy and photometry of stars selected in the HK objective-prism/interference-filter survey of Beers and colleagues has resulted in the identification of many hundreds of additional stars in the halo (and possibly the thick disk) of the Galaxy with abundances [Fe/H] -2.0. A new calibration of the technique for estimation of metal abundance based on a CaII K index as a function of broadband B - V color is applied to obtain metallicities for stars observed with the SSO 2.3m and INT 2.5m telescopes. This new data is combined with other samples of extremely metal-deficient stars (Ryan and Norris, 1991a; Beers et al., 1992; Carney et al., 1994) to form a large database of objects of low metallicity. The combined sample is examined and compared with expectations derived from a Simple Model of Galactic chemical evolution. There appears to be a statistically-significant deficit of stars more metal-weak than [Fe/H] = -3.0. An abundance of [Fe/H] -4.0 can be taken as the low-metallicity limit for presently-observable stars in the Galaxy.