Extremely metal-poor stars in classical dwarf spheroidal galaxies: Fornax, Sculptor and Sextans

Understand

We present the results of a dedicated search for extremely metal-poor stars in the Fornax, Sculptor and Sextans dSphs.

• Five stars were selected from two earlier VLT/Giraffe and HET/HRS surveys and subsequently followed up at high spectroscopic resolution with VLT/UVES.
• All of them turned out to have [Fe/H] <= -3 and three stars are below [Fe/H] -3.5.
• This constitutes the first evidence that the classical dSphs Fornax and Sextans join Sculptor in containing extremely metal-poor stars and suggests that all of the classical dSphs contain extremely metal-poor stars.