What is Your Cosmic Connection to the Elements?
The origin of the elements given in Figure 1 (and on the poster) was determined using the paper "The Evolution and explosion of massive stars" by S. E. Woosley, A. Heger, and T.A. Weaver, which appeared in Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol 74 (Oct 2002), page 1015 (see Table 3). We are in debted to Dr. Woosley (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) and Dr. Rob Hoffman (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) for private communications concerning this material.
Figure 1 identifies the one or two predominant sources for each of the elements. The question of how much contribution makes a source "predominant" can be somewhat uncertain. For the elements up to Zr, we relied on input from Woosley and Hoffman. For niobium through bisthmus, we utilized Table 4 of "s-process nucleosynthesis - nuclear physics and the classical model" by F. Kappeler, H. Beer and K. Wisshak, which appeared in Reports on the Progress of Physics, Vol 52 (1989), p. 934. The table gives the cross sections for s- and r-process production (i.e. small star and supernova production, respectively) for each of the isotopes for these elements. If both processes contribute more than 30% to the final abundance, we included both of them. Otherwise we included just the dominant process.
VIII. AcknowledgementsThe poster and booklet were developed by the Education and Public Outreach team at the Lab for High-Energy Astrophysics, NASA/GSFC, under the direction of Dr. James Lochner. Graphic design for the poster was done by Karen Smale. The booklet was assembled by Meredith Bene.
The classroom activities were developed by the attendees of the "Elements 2002 Educator Workshop", August 5-9, 2002 at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. This workshop was supported by the U.S. participation in the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL mission. We thank Dr. Ilan Chabay, The New Curiosity Shop, for invaluable assistance with the workshop, and for assistance given to the workshop participants in the development and review of the activities.
Special thanks to our model for the poster, Lai Li, Chesapeake Sr. High School, class of 2002, Pasadena, Maryland, and to our photographer Ms. Geri Cvetic (Chesapeake Sr. High).
