Submitted to The Astrophysical Journal- revised version The nucleosynthesis of 26 Al and 60 Fe in solar metallicity stars

We present the Al and Fe yields produced by a generation of solar metallicity stars ranging in mass between 11 and 120M⊙ . We discuss the production sites of these γ ray emitters and quantify the relative contributions of the various components. More specifically we provide the separate contribution of the wind, the C convective shell and the explosive Ne/C burning to the total Al yield per each stellar model in our grid. We provide the contributions of the He convective shell, the C convective shell and the explosive Ne/C burning to the Fe yield as well. From these computations we conclude that, at variance with current beliefs, Al is mainly produced by the explosive C/Ne burning over most of the mass interval presently analyzed while Fe is mainly produced by the C convective shell and the He convective shell. By means of these yields we try to reproduce two quite strong observational constraints related to the abundances of these nuclei in the interstellar medium, i.e. the number of γ1.8 photons per Lyman continuum photon, RGxL, and the Fe/Al γ-ray line flux ratio. RGxL is found to be roughly constant along the galactic plane (Knödlseder 1999) (and of the order of 1.25 × 10), while the Fe/Al ratio has beed recently measured by both RHESSI (0.17 ± 0.05) and SPI(INTEGRAL) (0.11±0.03). We can quite successfully fit simultaneously both ratios for a quite large range of exponents of the power law initial mass function. Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Via Frascati 33, I-00040, Monteporzio Catone, Italy; [email protected] Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, Via Fosso del Cavaliere, I-00133, Roma, Italy; [email protected] Centre for Stellar & Planetary Astrophysics, School of Mathematical Sciences, P.O. Box, 28M, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia