Astron. Astrophys. 347, 572-582 (1999)

7. Conclusions

As an aid to the confrontation between spectroscopic observations and theoretical expectations, the nucleosynthesis associated with the cold CNO, NeNa and MgAl modes of H burning, as well as with He burning, is studied with the help of the recent NACRE compilation of nuclear reaction rates. Special attention is paid to the impact on the derived abundances of the carefully evaluated uncertainties that still affect the rates of many reactions. In order to isolate this nuclear effect in an unambiguous way, a very simple constant temperature and density model is adopted.

It is shown that large spreads in the abundance predictions for several nuclides may result not only from a change in temperature, but also from nuclear physics uncertainties. This additional intricacy has to be kept in mind when trying to interpret the observations and when attempting to derive constraints on stellar models from these data.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1999

Online publication: June 30, 1999
helpdesk.link@springer.de