Nuclear cosmochronology within analytic models of the chemical evolution of the solar neighbourhood.
Abstract
This paper investigates whether the age of the Galaxy can be deduced from natural radioactivity. The author demonstrates that two recent influential claims (by Butcher and by Fowler) that such observations set the age at TG = 10 Gyr depend on special assumptions that run counter to existing astrophysical theory, so that greater ages are possible. The author derives exact analytic time-dependent linear models of the chemical evolution of the solar neighbourhood to illustrate the extent to which continuous growth of the local mass density by early additions of metal-poor matter greatly lengthens the galactic ages inferred from the Solar System abundances of natural radioactive nuclei and of their stable daughters.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- September 1988
- DOI:
- 10.1093/mnras/234.1.1
- Bibcode:
- 1988MNRAS.234....1C
- Keywords:
-
- Chemical Evolution;
- Computational Astrophysics;
- Cosmology;
- Radioactive Age Determination;
- Solar Neighborhood;
- Astronomical Models;
- Metallicity;
- Milky Way Galaxy;
- Nuclear Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics