CNO cycle

The CNO cycle (for carbon–nitrogen–oxygen) is one of the two known sets of fusion reactions by which stars convert hydrogen to helium, the other being the proton–proton chain reaction (pp-chain reaction). Unlike the latter, the CNO cycle is a catalytic cycle. It is dominant in stars that are more than 1.3 times as massive as the Sun. In the CNO cycle, four protons fuse, using carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopes as catalysts, to produce one alpha particle, two positrons and two electron neutrinos. Although there are various paths and catalysts involved in the CNO cycles, all these cycles have the same net result: The positrons will almost instantly annihilate with electrons, releasing energy in the form of gamma rays. The neutrinos escape from the star carrying away some energy. One nucleus goes on to become carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopes through a number of transformations in an endless loop. The proton–proton chain is more prominent in stars the mass of the Sun or less. This difference stems from temperature dependency differences between the two reactions; pp-chain reaction starts at temperatures around 4×106 K (4 megakelvin), making it the dominant energy source in smaller stars. A self-maintaining CNO chain starts at approximately 15×106 K, but its energy output rises much more rapidly with increasing temperatures so that it becomes the dominant source of energy at approximately 17×106 K.The Sun has a core temperature of around 15.7×106 K, and only 1.7% of 4He nuclei produced in the Sun areborn in the CNO cycle. The CNO-I process was independently proposed by Carl von Weizsäcker and Hans Bethe in the late 1930s. Under typical conditions found in stars, catalytic hydrogen burning by the CNO cycles is limited by proton captures. Specifically, the timescale for beta decay of the radioactive nuclei produced is faster than the timescale for fusion. Because of the long timescales involved, the cold CNO cycles convert hydrogen to helium slowly, allowing them to power stars in quiescent equilibrium for many years. The first proposed catalytic cycle for the conversion of hydrogen into helium was initially called the carbon–nitrogen cycle (CN-cycle), also referred to as the Bethe–Weizsäcker cycle in honor of the independent work of Carl von Weizsäcker in 1937-38 and Hans Bethe. Bethe's 1939 papers on the CN-cycle drew on three earlier papers written in collaboration with Robert Bacher and Milton Stanley Livingston and which came to be known informally as 'Bethe's Bible.' It was considered the standard work on nuclear physics for many years and was a significant factor in his being awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. Bethe's original calculations suggested the CN-cycle was the Sun's primary source of energy. This conclusion arose from what is now-known as a mistaken belief: that the abundance of nitrogen in the sun is approximately 10%, when it is actually less than half a percent. The CN-cycle, named as it contains no stable isotope of oxygen involves the following cycle of transformations: 126C → 137N → 136C → 147N → 158O → 157N → 126C. This cycle is now understood as being the first part of a larger process, the CNO-cycle, and the main reactions in this part of the cycle (CNO-I) are: where the carbon-12 nucleus used in the first reaction is regenerated in the last reaction. After the two positrons emitted annihilate with two ambient electrons producing an additional 2.04 MeV, the total energy released in one cycle is 26.73 MeV; in some texts, authors are erroneously including the positron annihilation energy in with the beta-decay Q-value and then neglecting the equal amount of energy released by annihilation, leading to possible confusion. All values are calculated with reference to the Atomic Mass Evaluation 2003. The limiting (slowest) reaction in the CNO-I cycle is the proton capture on 147N. In 2006 it was experimentally measured down to stellar energies, revising the calculated age of globular clusters by around 1 billion years.