THE r-PROCESS IN METAL-POOR STARS AND BLACK HOLE FORMATION

Abstract

Nucleosynthesis of heavy nuclei in metal-poor stars is generally thought to occur via the r-process because the r-process is a primary process that would have operated early in the Galaxy's history. This idea is strongly supported by the fact that the abundance pattern in many metal-poor stars matches well the inferred Solar r-process abundance pattern in the mass range between the second and third r-process abundance peaks. Nevertheless, a significant number of metal-poor stars do not share this standard r-process template. In this Letter we suggest that the nuclides observed in many of these stars are produced by the r-process, but that it is prevented from running to completion in more massive stars by collapse to black holes before the r-process is completed, creating a "truncated r-process," or "tr-process." We find that the observed fraction of tr-process stars is qualitatively what one would expect from the initial mass function, and that an apparent sharp truncation observed at around mass 160 could result from a combination of collapses to black holes and the difficulty of observing the higher mass rare earths. We test the tr-process hypothesis with r-process calculations that are terminated before all r-process trajectories have been ejected. We find qualitative agreement between observation and theory when black hole collapse and observational realities are taken into account.