Nucleosynthesis and the chemical enrichment of galaxies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Kobayashi, Chiaki
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kobayashi, Chiaki
author_facet Kobayashi, Chiaki
contents Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to constrain the physical processes during galaxy formation and evolution. This approach, Galactic archaeology, has been popularly used for our Milky Way Galaxy thanks to a vast amount of data from the Gaia satellite and multi-object spectrographs, and now can also be applied to very distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - extra-galactic archaeology. In these studies the most important factor is the input stellar physics, namely nucleosynthesis yields and binary physics, which predominantly determine the model predictions. In this review I give a summary of stellar nucleosynthesis, and how they are tested with the observations in the Milky Way. Then I show how chemical enrichment of galaxies can be calculated, and show some results with the latest nucleosynthesis yields.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20436
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Nucleosynthesis and the chemical enrichment of galaxies
Kobayashi, Chiaki
Astrophysics of Galaxies
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to constrain the physical processes during galaxy formation and evolution. This approach, Galactic archaeology, has been popularly used for our Milky Way Galaxy thanks to a vast amount of data from the Gaia satellite and multi-object spectrographs, and now can also be applied to very distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - extra-galactic archaeology. In these studies the most important factor is the input stellar physics, namely nucleosynthesis yields and binary physics, which predominantly determine the model predictions. In this review I give a summary of stellar nucleosynthesis, and how they are tested with the observations in the Milky Way. Then I show how chemical enrichment of galaxies can be calculated, and show some results with the latest nucleosynthesis yields.
title Nucleosynthesis and the chemical enrichment of galaxies
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20436