Abundances of elements of cosmological interest

Abstract

The nuclear species of cosmological interest are ¹ H, D, ³ He, ⁴ He and ⁷ Li (Schramm & Wagoner I977) and m this paper I shall try to explain what we know about their present abundances in the interstellar medium and what estimates of their primordial abundances we can make when the effects of nuclear synthesis and destruction in stars are allowed for. The interpretation of the resulting constraints on Big-Bang cosmology will largely be left to other papers in this symposium, apart from a small final excursion designed to discuss the mutual consistency of the constraints imposed by the various abundances within the framework of conventional Big-Bang models (Yang et al . 1979; Olive et al. 1981).