The Pristine survey: Towards a new view of the old Milky Way

Abstract

Studying the lowest metallicity stars gives us a local avenue to understand star formation and supernova feedback in the early Universe as well as the early build-up of the Milky Way. In this contribution, I demonstrate how we have become very efficient at finding these stars, thanks to very metallicity-sensitive narrow-band photometric surveys such as the Pristine survey. The Gaia astrometry and spectrophotometry information complements these narrow-band photometric datasets even further and the combination allows us to study the build-up of the Galaxy in much detail. I will share recent results on what these uncovered most metal-poor stars in the Galaxy tell us about the early assembly phase of the Milky Way as well as the nature of some of its most intriguing stellar substructures. Moreover, I highlight the bright future for this type of study in synergy with the upcoming massively multi-plexed stellar surveys such as WEAVE and 4MOST.