Abstract
Once all the helium has been exhausted and energy production by helium fusion into carbon has come to an end, the relentless gravitational force resumes its contraction and the star embarks upon the final steps of energy production by fusion.
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Notes
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The plasma of stellar matter can oscillate. These oscillations are analogous to oscillations of the electromagnetic field. In the case of the electromagnetic field, quantization of the field yields the classical photon. In a plasma, quantization yields the plasmon. The difference is that the photon has no rest mass while the plasmon does, and so can decay in several ways, e.g., producing neutrinos.
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We already mentioned this unique paper when discussing the nuclear reactions of light elements. However, the major breakthrough is in its contribution to the nuclear reactions in the last phases of stellar evolution. Hence we shall now elaborate on this point.
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Some people insist that it should be written as: \(\mathrm{ B}^2\mathrm{ FH}\), as in Chap. 7. I compromise and use here B2FH.
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A meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the B2FH paper was held in Caltech in 2007. It was at this meeting that Geoff Burbidge told how he had met Maria Mayer at the University of San Diego in 1962, and that it was through discussions with her that he had realized that stellar nucleosynthesis, as pioneered by Fred (Hoyle), had completely vanquished the earlier ideas of Gamow, Alpher, etc., except for the \(x\) -process.
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There was no ‘official’ statement in the paper that the \(\upalpha \) process was defunct, but the possibility of an \(\upalpha \) process for building up the elements was no longer mentioned there. It should be remarked that Hayashi, Hoshi, and Sugimoto, Suppl. Prog. Theor. Phys. Jpn 22, 1 (1962) did not mention the \(\upalpha \) process at all. On the other hand, they included reactions like magnesium and sulphur burning, which are not considered relevant today.
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The iron group contains isotopes like \(^{62}\mathrm{ Ni}_{28}\) to \(^{58}\mathrm{ Fe}_{26}\), as well as \(^{54}\mathrm{ Fe}_{26}\), which all lie close to the global minimum of the binding energy per nucleon. In other words, while the isotope \(^{62}\mathrm{ Ni}_{28}\) has the strict minimum in binding energy per nucleon, other nuclei in the group have binding energies which differ only slightly from it (\({<}0.001\)Â MeV).
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Shaviv, G. (2012). Beyond Carbon. In: The Synthesis of the Elements. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 387. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28385-7_9
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