Stellar Death at Low Metallicity

From the dust in the earliest galaxies to the elements making up rocky planets today, all astronomical metals have been made in successive generations of stars and returned to the interstellar medium (ISM) through these stars' subsequent demise. To understand the transition from pristine gas to the complex mixture of the ISM today, we must understand the life and - particularly - the death of the low-metallicity stars that have come before us.

In this colloquium, I will talk about death: that of (low-mass) metal-poor stars and how it differs from the solar-metallicity stars we see around us. I will discuss how the chemical and mineralogical return from these stars to space has changed over time, and the differences this implies for studying the high-redshift Universe.