Fred Hoyle: An Online Exhibition

Stellar Nucleosynthesis

Hoyle’s Notebook

In a surviving notebook from 1946, Hoyle wrote out the first version of his ideas on element synthesis. From these notes he produced a seminal paper taking the element building process up to iron ('The synthesis of the elements from hydrogen', Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 106 (1946), pp. 343-383). In this extract he worries over the slowness of the synthesis of carbon by the ‘triple-alpha’ process.

Hoyle's Notebook | The r-Process | B-squared-F-H

Extract from Hoyle's 1946 notebook showing his early ideas about stellar nucleosynthesis

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