The Origin of Elements from Carbon to Uranium

By C. Kobayashi, A. Karakas, M. Lugaro. Astrophysical Journal, 2020

359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To reach a deeper understanding of the origin of elements in the periodic table, we construct Galactic chemical evolution (GCE) models for all stable elements from C (A = 12) to U (A = 238) from first principles, i.e., using theoretical nucleosynthesis yields and event rates of all chemical enrichment sources. This enables us to predict the origin of elements as a function of time and environment. In the solar neighborhood, we find that stars with initial masses of M > 30M ⊙ can become failed supernovae if there is a significant contribution from hypernovae (HNe) at M ∼ 20–50M ⊙. The contribution to GCE from super-asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars (with M ∼ 8–10M ⊙ at solar metallicity) is negligible, unless hybrid white dwarfs from low-mass super-AGB stars explode as so-called Type Iax supernovae, or high-mass super-AGB stars explode as electron-capture supernovae (ECSNe). Among neutron-capture elements, the observed abundances of the second (Ba) and third (Pb) peak elements are well reproduced with our updated yields of the slow neutron-capture process (s-process) from AGB stars. The first peak elements (Sr, Y, Zr) are sufficiently produced by ECSNe together with AGB stars. Neutron star mergers can produce rapid neutron-capture process (r-process) elements up to Th and U, but the timescales are too long to explain observations at low metallicities. The observed evolutionary trends, such as for Eu, can well be explained if ∼3% of 25–50M ⊙ HNe are magneto-rotational supernovae producing r-process elements. Along with the solar neighborhood, we also predict the evolutionary trends in the halo, bulge, and thick disk for future comparison with Galactic archeology surveys.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35b8f232cc0014b44f469c2941d55fe27317e8db

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

The GALAH+ survey: Third data release (2020, background): “…formation of the halo and disc remains enigmatic, but the progress of cosmological simulations is now allowing us to by comparing properties like the chemical bimodality of the Milky Way’s stellar disc those of simulated galaxies (e.g. Buck 2020; Vincenzo & Kobayashi 2020, and references therein).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “ical enrichment of the Universe, particularly with elements created through r-process nucleosynthesis likely associated with mergers involving NSs with their neutron-rich material (Kasen et al., 2017; Côté et al., 2018; Metzger, 2019; Kobayashi et al., 2020).”