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Isotope astrophysics

Two cradles for the heavy elements

Nature volume 391, pages 229–231 (1998)Cite this article

Where do the Solar System's heavy elements come from? We know that many of the elements heavier than iron must have been formed in supernovae; but exactly how? Taken together, three new papers (one on page 261 of this issue1, and two to appear in the Astrophysical Journal2,3) imply that two different types of supernova are responsible for elements in different mass regimes.

It is now some four decades since Suess and Urey4, largely working from analyses of meteorites, assembled a table of abundances of the elements that enabled nuclear physicists to identify the principal processes in stellar interiors that had produced those elements. The actual nuclear physics of those processes became reasonably well understood within the following few years. However, it has taken considerably longer for us to understand the astrophysical environments within stellar interiors in which many of those processes take place. The process whose environment has proved most elusive has been the r-process, in which neutron capture takes place on a very rapid timescale.

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Figure 1: The solar abundances of the nuclides, as a function of mass number, showing the p-, s- and r-process contributions.
Figure 2: Overabundances of xenon from pre-solar diamonds, relative to solar values.

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  1. the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    A. G. W. Cameron

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Cameron, A. Two cradles for the heavy elements. Nature 391, 229–231 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/34535

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