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 Physics , 2009, Abstract: This white paper, directed to the Stars and Stellar Evolution panel, has three objectives: 1) to provide the Astro2010 Decadal Survey with a vista into the goals of the nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics community; 2) to alert the astronomical community of joint opportunities for discoveries at the interface between nuclear physics and astronomy; and 3) to delineate efforts in nuclear physics and describe the observational and theoretical advances in astrophysics necessary to make progress towards answering the following questions in the Nuclear Science 2007 Long Range Plan: 1) What is the origin and distribution of the elements? 2) What are the nuclear reactions that power stars and stellar explosions? 3) What is the nature of dense matter? The scope of this white paper concerns the specific area of "low energy" nuclear astrophysics. We define this as the area of overlap between astrophysics and the study of nuclear structure and reactions. Of the questions listed above, two -- What is the origin of the elements? and What is the nature of dense matter? -- were specifically listed in the National Academies Study, "Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos".
 Physics , 2001, DOI: 10.1016/S1384-1076(01)00053-7 Abstract: The theoretical predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) are dominated by uncertainties in the input nuclear reaction cross sections. In this paper, we examine the impact on BBN of the recent compilation of nuclear data and thermonuclear reactions rates by the NACRE collaboration. We confirm that the adopted rates do not make large overall changes in central values of predictions, but do affect the magnitude of the uncertainties in these predictions. Therefore, we then examine in detail the uncertainties in the individual reaction rates considered by NACRE. When the error estimates by NACRE are treated as 1\sigma limits, the resulting BBN error budget is similar to those of previous tabulations. We propose two new procedures for deriving reaction rate uncertainties from the nuclear data: one which sets lower limits to the error, and one which we believe is a reasonable description of the present error budget. We propagate these uncertainty estimates through the BBN code, and find that when the nuclear data errors are described most accurately, the resulting light element uncertainties are notably smaller than in some previous tabulations, but larger than others. Using these results, we derive limits on the cosmic baryon-to-photon ratio $\eta$, and compare this to independent limits on $\eta$ from recent balloon-borne measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). We discuss means to improve the BBN results via key nuclear reaction measurements and light element observations.