Protostellar accretion and the cosmological lithium problem (2004.07491v1)

Abstract: The cosmological lithium problem, i.e. the discrepancy between the lithium abundance predicted by the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the one observed for the stars of the "Spite plateau", is one of the long standing problems of modern astrophysics. A possible astrophysical solution involves lithium burning due to protostellar mass accretion on Spite plateau stars. In present work, for the first time, we investigate with accurate evolutionary computations the impact of accretion on the lithium evolution in the metal-poor regime, that relevant for stars in the Spite plateau.