Synthesis of the Elements in Stars

The B²FH paper, named after the initials of the authors of the paper, Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle, is a landmark paper of stellar physics published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1957. The formal title of the paper is Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, but the article is generally referred to only as "B²FH".

The paper comprehensively outlined and analyzed several key processes that might be responsible for the synthesis of elements in nature and their relative abundance, and it is credited with originating what is now the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.

At the time of the publication of the B²FH paper, George Gamow advocated a theory of the universe according to which virtually all elements, or atomic nuclei, were synthesized during the big bang. The implications of Gamow's nucleosynthesis theory (not to be confused with present-day nucleosynthesis theory) is that nuclear abundances in the universe are largely static. Together, Hans Bethe and Charles L. Critchfield had derived the Proton proton chain (pp-chain) in 1938, and Carl von Weizsäcker and Hans Bethe had independently derived the CNO cycle in 1938 and 1939, respectively, to show that the conversion of hydrogen to helium by nuclear fusion could account for stellar energy production. Thus, it was known by Gamow and others in 1957 that the abundances of hydrogen and helium were not perfectly static.

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