Anna Frebel: "Searching for the Oldest Stars" | Talks at Google

Anna Frebel visited Google's office in Cambridge, MA to discuss her book "Searching for the Oldest Stars: Ancient Relics from the Early Universe".
In "Searching for the Oldest Stars", Dr. Frebel combines current astronomical knowledge and work with her own experiences in the field. She explains how sections of the night sky are "excavated" in the hunt for these extremely rare relic stars—some of which have been shining for more than 13 billion years—and how this quest is revealing new details about the earliest times in the universe. She describes how the first stars formed soon after the Big Bang and then exploded as supernovae, leaving behind chemical fingerprints that were incorporated into the ancient stars we can still observe today.
Anna Frebel is Assistant Professor in the Physics department at MIT. She has received numerous international honors and awards for her discoveries and analyses of the oldest stars. Google Scholar returns over 17,000 results containing her name. In her spare time, she answers questions about science from first- and second-graders on YouTube.