Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Aug 1993
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993apj...413l..73s&link_type=abstract
Astrophysical Journal, Part 2 - Letters (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 413, no. 2, p. L73-L76.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
20
Interstellar Matter, Lithium Isotopes, Metallicity, Milky Way Galaxy, Abundance, Solar System
Scientific paper
The present abundances of Li-6 and Li-7, when compared with the solar system values, can provide valuable information on stellar and cosmic-ray nucleosynthesis, stellar structure and evolution, and Galactic chemical evolution in the solar vicinity in the last 4.6 Gyr. Unfortunately, the interpretation of stellar data from observations of main-sequence stars in young clusters and of pre-main-sequence stars are clouded by large and uncertain corrections for burning of lithium and for non-LTE effects, and the interpretation of observations of interstellar Li are rendered uncertain by large and unknowable corrections for ionization and depletion onto grains and/or molecules. In this Letter it is shown that the singular origin for Population I Li-6 offers the potential for exploiting bounds to interstellar beryllium and boron to infer an upper bound to the present interstellar Li-6 abundance. Then the recent observations (Lemoine et al., 1992; Meyer et al., 1993) of the interstellar Li-7/Li-6 ratio may be utilized to bound the present abundance of Li-7. This approach is independent of any model for the evolution of Li-7. The current data suggest that the Li abundance has barely increased, and may well have decreased, in the 4.6 Gyr since the formation of the solar system. This result is inconsistent with the predictions of chemical evolution models and raises the question of the reliability of the sun as a probe of the abundances in the local ISM 4.6 Gyr ago.
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