Abstract
Cosmic chemical evolution describes the chemical enrichment occurring in a unitary comoving volume of the Universe as a function of cosmic time. While galactic chemical evolution concerns single galaxies, cosmic chemical evolution refers to a mixture of galaxies of different morphological type whose contributions to chemical enrichment are weighted according to their luminosity (mass) function. In this chapter, we will describe the basic principles for computing cosmic chemical evolution together with some model results compared to observations. The cosmic census of metals will also be discussed.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Matteucci, F. (2012). Cosmic Chemical Evolution. In: Chemical Evolution of Galaxies. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22491-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22491-1_8
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22490-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-22491-1
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