Abstract
IT has been suggested1that matter in accretion disks around compact objects such as black holes or neutron stars, which appear to be responsible for galactic X-ray sources, may experience ideal conditions for classical rapid neutron-capture ('r-process') nucleosynthesis2. Systems in which accretion drives an outflow from a region near the compact object might thereby enrich the interstellar medium in r-process elements, such as europium. Here I present a more detailed assessment of the efficacy of this mechanism for the r-process. By considering the constraints imposed by typical accretion-disk conditions, I conclude that r-process elements are unlikely to have been made this way, largely because the total production is too low, by a factor of ∼105, to explain the observed abundances.
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Jin, L. Constraints on r-process nucleosynthesis in accretion disks. Nature 350, 403–404 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1038/350403a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/350403a0
