Thirty papers provide an overview of the current understanding about the creation of the nuclei of the featherweight elements hydrogen, helium, and lithium in the Hot Early Universe. They combine observational and theoretical results on the early universe, the distant galaxies, our own Milky Way, the local interstellar cloud, and the solar nebula. They also consider implications of the findings for cosmology, galactic and stellar evolution, research into dark matter, and other areas of interest. Among the topics are the big-bang nucleosynthesis and the density of baryons in the universe, the primordial helium-4 abundance from observations of a large sample of blue compact dwarf galaxies, the low metallicity tail of the halo metallicity distribution function, the chemical evolution of the Milky Way disk, and deuterium observations in the galaxy. No subject index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
