Stellar nucleosynthesis

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. The production of the chemical elements inside stars, set out systematically in the 1957 review by Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle that is universally known as B2FH. Hydrogen and helium and a little lithium came from the Big Bang; essentially everything else was assembled afterwards. Carbon and oxygen come from helium burning in giants; the elements up to the iron peak come from successive burning stages in massive stars; elements beyond iron cannot be made by fusion at all and require neutron capture, either slow (the s-process, in AGB stars, where neutrons are added slowly enough for unstable nuclei to decay between captures) or rapid (the r-process, where they are not). The paper's framework has been extended and corrected for nearly seventy years but not replaced, and it is the reason the question "where did this atom come from" has a specific, answerable form. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. The iron peak in nuclear binding energy
5. Stellar nucleosynthesis
6. Connections
7. Hydrogen fusion: the proton-proton chain and the CNO cycle
8. The iron peak in nuclear binding energy
9. Rapid neutron capture (the r-process)
10. The first stars form from metal-free gas
11. B2FH sets out the synthesis of the elements in stars
12. A neutron-star merger is detected in gravitational waves and light
13. Supernova
14. Stellar nucleosynthesis
15. B2FH sets out the synthesis of the elements in stars
16. Evidence
17. Establishes stellar nucleosynthesis as the origin of the elements heavier than helium and organises production into distinct nuclear processes including slow and rapid neutron capture. Title, authors, journal, volume and pages were read from ADS and publisher listings via search; the review itself was not fetched, so the internal process taxonomy is described from secondary accounts.
18. Establishes the 17 August 2017 binary neutron-star merger and the associated kilonova AT2017gfo in NGC 4993 at roughly 40 Mpc as a site of r-process nucleosynthesis. Volume and page numbers are deliberately not asserted because they were not confirmed. Ejecta mass estimates of 0.03-0.06 solar masses come from modelling papers summarised via search, not from this paper.