Related papers: r-Process Enhanced Halo Stars
The rapid neutron-capture process (r-process) is responsible for the creation of roughly half of the elements heavier than iron, including precious metals like silver, gold, and platinum, as well as radioactive elements such as thorium and…
Neutron-star mergers were recently confirmed as sites of rapid-neutron-capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis. However, in Galactic chemical evolution models, neutron-star mergers alone cannot reproduce the observed element abundance patterns…
The oldest stars in the universe retain to a great extent detailed information on the chemical composition of the interstellar medium at the time of their birth. Hence the earliest phases of Galactic chemical evolution and nucleosynthesis…
The production of about half of the heavy elements found in nature is assigned to a specific astrophysical nucleosynthesis process: the rapid neutron capture process (r-process). Although this idea has been postulated more than six decades…
We present new abundance determinations of neutron-capture elements Ge, Zr, Os, Ir, and Pt in a sample of 11 metal-poor (-3.1 <= [Fe/H] <= -1.6) Galactic halo giant stars, based on Hubble Space Telescope UV and Keck I optical…
The chemical abundances of elements such as barium and the lanthanides are essential to understand the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements in the early Universe as well as the contribution of different neutron capture processes (for example…
We review recent observational studies of heavy element abundances in low metallicity stars and explore some implications of these results for nucleosynthesis and early Galactic chemical evolution.
The chemical abundances of metal-poor stars provide a great deal of information regarding the individual nucleosynthetic processes that created the observed elements and the overall process of chemical enrichment of the galaxy since the…
Elements heavier than zinc are synthesized through the (r)apid and (s)low neutron-capture processes. The main site of production of the r-process elements (such as europium) has been debated for nearly 60 years. Initial studies of chemical…
We present the abundance analyses for the neutron-capture elements, and discuss the observed abundance distributions in very metal-poor stars with excesses of r-process elements. As has been found by previous abundance studies, the…
Neutron-capture elements, those with Z > 35, are the least well-understood in terms of nucleosynthesis and formation environments. The rapid neutron-capture, or r-process, elements are formed in the environments and/or remnants of massive…
Understanding the origin of the elements has been a decades long pursuit, with many open questions still remaining. Old stars found in the Milky Way and its dwarf satellite galaxies can provide answers because they preserve clean elemental…
The abundances of r-process elements of very metal-poor stars capture the history of the r-process enrichment in the early stage of star formation in a galaxy. Currently, various types of astrophysical sites including neutron star mergers,…
First results are reported of a new abundance study of neutron-capture elements in the ultra-metal-poor (UMP; [Fe/H] = -3.1) halo field giant star CS 22892-052. Using new high resolution, high signal-to-noise spectra, abundances of more…
We report Sr, Pd and Ag abundances for a sample of metal-poor field giants and analyze a larger sample of Y, Zr, and Ba abundances. The [Y/Zr] and [Pd/Ag] abundance ratios are similar to those measured for the r-process-rich stars CS…
We present new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) abundance observations of the neutron-capture elements Ge, Zr, Os and Pt in a group of 11 Galactic halo stars, including the well studied r-process rich CS 22892-052 and the r-process poor, bright…
The rapid neutron-capture process or r-process is thought to produce the majority of the heavy elements (Z > 30) in extremely metal-poor stars. The same process is also responsible for a significant fraction of the heavy elements in the…
We propose an explanation for the considerable scatter of the abundances of neutron capture elements observed in low-metallicity stars in the solar vicinity, compared to the small star-to-star scatter observed for the alpha-elements. We…
Rapid neutron-capture (i.e., r-process) nucleosynthesis calculations, employing internally consistent and physically realistic nuclear physics input (QRPA beta-decay rates and the ETFSI-Q nuclear mass model), have been made. These…
Various nucleosynthesis studies have pointed out that the r-process elements in very metal-poor (VMP) halo stars might have different origins. By means of familiar concepts from statistics (correlations, cluster analysis, rank tests of…