B2FH Paper

The B2FH paper, named after the initials of 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 has come to be referred to only as "B2FH", a high tribute to the great influence that it exerted for decades. The B2FH paper is one of the most heavily cited papers in astrophysics history. By referring to hundreds of observations by astronomers about nucleosynthesis issues, it drew the world of astronomy into nucleosynthesis in stars in a way that Hoyle's prior work had never done. It created little new in the theory except in the conversion of one heavy element into another by the s-process and the r-process, but it formulated more poorly than Hoyle's undercited 1954 paper had done how the metal abundances of the primary astronomical elements, those elements between magnesium and nickel in atomic weight, had grown continuously in stars during the history of massive star evolution the galaxy. This is the most important part of nucleosynthesis, but B2FH had formulated it poorly, trying to pass it off as their ill-conceived alpha process. See explosive nucleosynthesis section of nucleosynthesis.

The B2FH paper comprehensively outlined and analyzed several key processes that might be responsible for the synthesis of elements in nature and their relative abundance, but is often mistakenly credited with originating what is now the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. Hundreds of subsequent papers cited it in that way without, unfortunately, actually reading Hoyle's two prior papers or even the B2FH review paper itself. Even a special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics published in 1997 as a fortieth-year tribute to B2FH by multiple coauthors fails to cite adequately the importance of Hoyle's 1954 theory to that science, continuing inadequate citation even four decades after the B2FH paper. Another pioneer of nucleosynthesis theory, one who worked intimately with both Hoyle and Fowler from 1957 until their deaths, exposed the citation debacle in a Science Perspective and in a review paper, both written at the fiftieth anniversary of the B2FH paper.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings there are many reasons that the B2FH review paper is one of the best known in astrophysics history and in the sociology of citations. It galvanized the astronomical community into action, not least by publishing photographic plates of atomic spectra taken at the telescope showing how they may demonstrate the truth of nucleosynthesis in stars. Bear in mind that in 1957 there still existed astronomers who doubted stellar nucleosynthesis. Margaret Burbidge was a practicing stellar spectroscopist of note who saw the brilliance of including these plates. Geoffrey Burbidge was a general astrophysicist of considerable brilliance and force. William A. Fowler was the true nuclear physicist, to whom all questions of nuclear physics were directed. Fred Hoyle, the unquestioned founder of the theory, was the only true expert in nucleosynthesis. So this distinguished group was just right to promote one of the truly important theories in the history of astronomy.