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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. :-(
I believe they meant "precisely", not "accurately". Their theories make a prediction which has error bars on it; the measurements taken have error bars on them; the error bars do not overlap.
No it wouldn't.
"Astronomers can calculate how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe".
What part of the words "they expect" are you finding difficult to understand? Adding "believe they" is tautological. Their expectations are based not on "their experience with other elements" but on a model. If the expectations are wrong, as they seem to be, then the model is wrong. That model is more than just BBN, but all of it should be questioned. However, this implication is contained in "they expect". That expectation is based on some assumptions. Those assumptions seem to be incomplete or inaccurate.
"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"?
You're being a pedant.
Let me rephrase for you: Using our current model of the big bang, scientists come up with 3x as much lithium as is measured. Therefor the model likely needs adjusting or there is something about the post big-bang that we do not quite understand.
By accurate they mean this measurement directly contradicts the model. There is no way for an error in the calculation to account for the difference.
That the models predict an amount of lithium with narrow error bars.
It's a really neat prediction, it just happens not to agree with the measurements.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
http://www.nature.com/nature/j... Can any astro-types chime in on this?
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