Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis and Galactic Chemical Evolution

Abstract

Deuterium is the best indicator of the baryon density; however, only its present abundance is known (and only locally) and its chemical evolution is intertwined with that of ${}^3$He. Because galactic abundances are spatially heterogeneous, mean chemical-evolution models are not well suited for extrapolating the pre-solar D and ${}^3$He abundances to their primeval values. We introduce a new approach which explicitly addresses heterogeneity, and show that the decade-old big-bang nucleosynthesis concordance interval $\eta \approx (2-8)\times 10^{-10}$ based on D and ${}^3$He is robust.

9 pages, LaTeX(2.09), 4 postscript figures (attached). A postscript version with figures can be found at ftp://astro.uchicago.edu/pub/astro/chem_evolution. (See the README file for details). REVISION: Numerous changes have been made to the text and the focus of the discussion has changed

References in corpus (1)

• Galactic Chemical Evolution: Hydrogen Through Zinc

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