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Universal Big Bang Lithium Deficit Confirmed
An anonymous reader writes New observations of the star cluster Messier 54 show that it is just as deficient in lithium as our own galaxy, furthering a mystery about the element's big bang origins. "Most of the light chemical element lithium now present in the Universe was produced during the Big Bang, along with hydrogen and helium, but in much smaller quantities. Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe, and from this work out how much they should see in old stars. But the numbers don't match — there is about three times less lithium in stars than expected. This mystery remains unsolved, despite several decades of work."
Elon Musk has cornered the supply of lithium for his giga factory. That man thinks centuries ahead of rest of the world and pundits! Man! Morgan cornering silver is nothing compared to this heist.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Civilizations more advanced than our own understood that electric vehicles were the way to go, and they mined it all.
This is really depressing news. :-(
No wonder the universe is so mentally unbalanced.
I checked Netcraft, and they did NOT confirm it...
WTF does that even mean?
"Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe," can they? How do they know it's accurate? What control values are they using?
It's not entirely semantic, either; it goes on to say, "But the numbers don't match."
So how is that "quite accurate"?
So the accelerated expansion of the universe is fueled by Lithium. Thant's what I always figured. Shrunken minds => expanded space.
We eventually use up all the Lithium in the universe to power our mobile phones over the next few thousand years. Are we looking at the future past.
WTF does "3x less" mean? Do you mean 1/3 as much as expected, i.e. 66% less?
If the observations don't match the theory then it's obviously time to adjust the observations.
Maybe astronomers don't actually know as much as they think they know. I encourage them to watch the Distant Origins episode of ST:Voyager and pay close attention to just how badly the Saurians deduced human anatomy from the skeletal fragments they found.
Simple! Trilithium is a nuclear inhibitor. Therefore any stars with excess trilithium would collapse at the moment of formation and we would never see them.
WTF does that even mean? Is there 1/3 of the expected lithium? Or something else?
Good thing they have helium. For all their hard drives and party balloons.
Maybe most of it is in a form that has a different spectral profile, maybe crystalline, and maybe it's "warpy"
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
It's not terribly difficult to compute a value that matches your... computations.
Without being facetious, I'm not even sure what the author meant to say here.
Take lithium supplements. It also keeps me from getting...upset. You wouldn't like me when I get upset.
You are welcome on my lawn.
certain people on here would be questioning the entire theory because it failed to match outcomes with 100% accuracy.
The missing quantity is bound up as Crystalline Dilithium, which doesn't show up in normal spectroscopic scans.
What do they think powered the big bang?
Lithium batteries, of course. Duh!
Stop saying three times less! It is wrong!
You can find one thirds as much as you expected, but not three times less.
Three times less means something has to be multiplied by 3 and subtracted.
X - 3X = -2X!
It is both gramatically and mathmatically incorrect.
Stop it!
An alien race harvested all the lithium that's missing billions of years ago to make their own super batteries long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Or, someone effed up and can't count or missed a mundane detail in an equation somewhere and moved a decimal point.
"Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe"
This is getting old. Even on Star Trek they can't detect things that far away. How the hell do we know how much lithium is under a planet's crust with no light bouncing off of it and it's millions of lightyears away? In fact, their used their magical light frequency technique on one of the moons in our own solar system and then found out a few months ago they were drastically wrong about its chemical composition. But I'm sure they can count lithium atoms from a million lightyears in a billion star systems perfectly accurately.
I guess that disproves the Big Bang Theory! Now what show am I going to watch?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
http://www.nature.com/nature/j... Can any astro-types chime in on this?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Perhaps Lithium is radioactive, but with a 2 billion year half-life? Perhaps all the elements are, but with much longer half-lifes, and everything will end up as hydrogen again before the ultimate heat death of the universe.
-- Sent from a computer.
I think the Klingons have been taking all the lithium from the galaxy in the form of dilithium crystals.
No you're wrong. 3x less means "off by a factor of 3." This means the estimated amount is 3x more than the observed.
People with proper language parsing skill understand this. Obtuse pedants such as yourself don't.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The big bang happened but on a much smaller scale, and there was already stuff here before the big bang.
We assume there was no stuff before our known universe expanded and that our known universe expanded at XYZ to account for the amount of energy and matter we have now.
But we are making a lot of assumptions still.
"there is about three times less lithium in stars than expected"
It's my pet peeve that people speak like this- it just shows that they don't understand basic math. If the researchers expect 1 trillion tons of lithium, then "Three times less" would be 3*(1 trillion tons). "Three times less" would be 1trillion - 3*(1trillion) = -2 trillion tons of lithium. OMG, this explains all that dark matter that we've heard about- there's anti-lithium everywhere!
The correct phrasing would be "A third as much as expected". I can't take articles like this seriously when it presented by someone who fails to understand basic math!
Aliens...?
It's not a maths issue, it's an issue of idiomatic versus literal English. "N times more" doesn't mean "Add N times the original value", it just means "N times the original value". Similarly "N times less" doesn't mean "Subtract N times the original value", it means "reciprocal N times the original value".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Big Bang as a universal manic phase. Needs more lithium.
If you spend several decades of your life simply trying to compute the amount of lithium in another galaxy, I am sorry for you, but to have all of that useless work proven wrong just makes me laugh a little. I am very interested to know what, if anything, this would have proved. Pretty sure this calculation isn't going to convert muslims to science and frankly it seems the only practical application.
All sarcasm aside, does anyone know what the hypothesis was designed to support or prove in the grander scheme?
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
The civilizations that evolved earlier than us harvested it all to power their plugin-hybrid starships. What are you going to do about that, Elon?
I suppose that it explain all the buzz around dark energy.
Man tries to apply logic of maths to languages! Watch at 11 when we point and laugh.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How can we have warp drive without dilithium crystals?
Time traveling Lithium miners from the future universe?
The other 2/3 is just Dark Lithium!
Go ahead, celebrate your ignorance. It's funny, so laugh it up.
This is talking about big bang nucleosynthesis. The energies in question are reachable by our current particle accelerators, which gives us a relatively good understanding of the physics involved. Lithium was theorized to be a relatively small percentage of the mass created during this period, and this study gives evidence that it is smaller than previously calculated. Generally, when one is looking at physical discrepancies, the ultimate prize would be to find evidence of new physical phenomenae, these days usually referred to as 'Beyond the Standard Model' (BtSM). However, in this case it's more of a refinement to the theory -- just trying to better understand natural history. None of the work involved has been useless, and I don't know where you get that idea; this study is confirming previous results, not forging any new ground. Expecting practical results from astrophysics doesn't make a great deal of sense to me unless you're in the habit of dragging new stars home as pets.
I'm tempted to say something snarky about the possibility of converting Christians to science, but frankly those kind of biases don't deserve promotion, even in jest.
Another journalist misuses the word "accurately."
Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe
They can calculate it quite precisely; but if the number doesn't match observations, the model is not accurate.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
" there is about three times less lithium in stars than expected "
God I hate this style of description. We expected to find 100 units but we found -200 instead?
pet peeve of the day completed.
OK, "there is about three times less lithium in stars than expected."
Unless....
Unless the start of it all was coordinated by a gazilion elves
all co-ordinating things with cell phones (Li batteries).
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
it already reached Nirvana