English

Galactic Evolution Of D And 3He Including Stellar Production Of 3He

Astrophysics 2009-10-28 v1

Abstract

New stellar models which track the production and destruction of 3^3He (and D) have been evolved for a range of stellar masses (0.65M/M100)(0.65\leq M/M_{\odot}\leq 100), metallicities (0.01Z/Z1)(0.01 \leq Z/Z_{\odot} \leq 1) and initial (main sequence) 3^3He mass fractions (105X3,MS103)(10^{-5} \leq X_{3,MS} \leq 10^{-3}). Armed with the 3^3He yields from these stellar models we have followed the evolution of D and 3^3He using a variety of chemical evolution models with and without infall of primordial or processed material. Production of new 3^3He by the lower mass stars overwhelms any reasonable primordial contributions and leads to predicted abundances in the presolar nebula and/or the present interstellar medium in excess of the observationally inferred values. This result, which obtains even for zero primordial D and 3^3He, and was anticipated by Rood, Steigman \& Tinsley (1976), is insensitive to the choice of chemical evolution model; it is driven by the large 3^3He yields from low mass stars. In an attempt to ameliorate this problem we have considered a number of non-standard models in which the yields from low mass stars have been modified. Although several of these non-standard models may be consistent with the 3^3He data, they may be inconsistent with observations of 12^{12}C/13^{13}C, 18^{18}O and, most seriously, the super-3^3He rich planetary nebulae (Rood, Bania \& Wilson 1992). Even using the most extreme of these non-standard models (Hogan 1995), we obtain a generous upper bound to pre-galactic 3^3He: X3P3.2×105_{3P} \leq 3.2 \times10^{-5} which, nonetheless, leads to a stringent lower bound to the universal density of nucleons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9601117,
  title  = {Galactic Evolution Of D And 3He Including Stellar Production Of 3He},
  author = {David S. P. Dearborn and Gary Steigman and Monica Tosi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9601117},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

21 pages, plus 10 figures, accepted by ApJ