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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
Since the appearance of the classical papers on stellar nucleosynthesis in the 1950’s most of the observational tests have been through indirect sources of information. Even though this has been rather successful (cf. various contributions in this volume), it represents only an average over all sources, yielding little information about specific stars. The most direct evidence comes from observations of young galactic supernova remnants (age less than ∼103 years). Unfortunately, the analysis of X-ray data are hampered by a lack of understanding of the detailed physics, eg. non-equilibrium and plasma effects, as well as by observational problems (Itoh and Nomoto, 1987). Optical observations (cf. Raymond, 1984) have given some valuable insight of eg. the oxygen-rich remnants. The analysis of these are, however, suffering from the fact that only a small fraction of the mass is seen in the optical.