Stellar nucleosynthesis
node
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.
A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.
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Evidence · 2
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Connections · 1
- The iron peak in nuclear binding energyconstrained_by
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Observed changes · 0
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