A survey of Ne , O and Fe coronal abundances culled from the recent literature for about 60 late-type stars confirms that the Ne/O ratio of stellar outer atmospheres is about two times the value recently recommended by Asplund et al .
The mean Ne/O remains flat from the most active stars down to at least intermediate activity levels ( -5 < L _ { X } / L _ { bol } < -2 ) , with some evidence for a decline toward the lowest activity levels sampled .
The abundances surveyed are all based on emission measure distribution analyses and the mean Ne/O is about 0.1 dex lower than that found from line ratios in the seminal study of mostly active stars by Drake & Testa ( 2005 ) , but is within the systematic uncertainties of that study .
We also confirm a pattern of strongly decreasing Fe/O with increasing stellar activity .
The observed abundance patterns are reminiscent of the recent finding of a dependence of the solar Ne/O and Fe/O ratios on active region plasma temperature and indicate a universal fractionation process is at work .
The firm saturation in stellar Ne/O at higher activity levels combined with variability in the solar coronal Ne/O leads us to suggest that Ne is generally depleted in the solar outer atmosphere and photospheric values are reflected in active stellar coronae .
The solution to the recent solar model problem would then appear to lie in a combination of the Asplund et al .
( 2005 ) O abundance downward revision being too large , and the Ne abundance being underestimated for the Sun by about a factor of 2 .