Nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang and in Stars

Abstract

The quest for the origin of the elements is probably as old as human attempts to understand the world around us. While, during most of our history, such questions were addressed within the fields of philosophy and theology, it has been only during this century that a thoroughly scientific approach has been developed to study such questions. This approach inevitably includes the field of nuclear astrophysics, the intersection of nuclear physics and astrophysics, that has been developed from the insights of many great scientists, including Eddington, Gamow, Bethe, von Weizsücker and, a little later, Hoyle and Fowler. They realized that nuclear processes are able to generate the energy of stars over their lifetimes, and in doing so, synthesize heavier elements from hydrogen and helium, the main nuclides produced during the Big Bang, the earliest, explosive period of our expanding universe.

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