Spallative Nucleosynthesis in Supernova Remnants. II. Time-dependent numerical results

TL;DR

This study models the time-dependent production of light elements like beryllium in supernova remnants, finding that supernovae alone cannot explain observed abundances, and proposing superbubbles as a potential solution.

Contribution

It provides a detailed time-dependent numerical analysis of spallative nucleosynthesis in supernova remnants, incorporating particle acceleration and energy losses, and compares results with observational data.

Findings

Supernovae alone cannot account for observed Be levels in metal-poor stars.

The model shows the importance of energy losses and dilution in nucleosynthesis.

Superbubbles may help resolve the energetics problem in Galactic chemical evolution.

Abstract

We calculate the spallative production of light elements associated with the explosion of an isolated supernova in the interstellar medium, using a time-dependent model taking into account the dilution of the ejected enriched material and the adiabatic energy losses. We first derive the injection function of energetic particles (EPs) accelerated at both the forward and the reverse shock, as a function of time. Then we calculate the Be yields obtained in both cases and compare them to the value implied by the observational data for metal-poor stars in the halo of our Galaxy, using both O and Fe data. We find that none of the processes investigated here can account for the amount of Be found in these stars, which confirms the analytical results of Parizot and Drury (1999). We finally analyze the consequences of these results for Galactic chemical evolution, and suggest that a model involving superbubbles might alleviate the energetics problem in a quite natural way.