Nucleosynthesis During Silicon Burning

Silicon burning at temperatures in the neighborhood of 4 × ${10}^9$ °K has been studied with the aid of a quasiequilibrium model which describes the abundance of the nuclei in the interval $28<~A<~62$. It is found that, for a broad range of temperatures and densities, silicon burning leads to nuclear abundance distributions which match important features of the natural solar-system abundance distributions and that a large nuclear energy release accompanies silicon burning.