Researchers account for some of the lithium missing from our universe
UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO
There is a significant discrepancy between theoretical and observed amounts of lithium in our universe. This is known as the cosmological lithium problem, and it has plagued cosmologists for decades. Now, researchers have reduced this discrepancy by around 10%, thanks to a new experiment on the nuclear processes responsible for the creation of lithium. This research could point the way to a more complete understanding of the early universe.
There is a famous saying that, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” This holds true in every academic domain, but it’s especially common in cosmology, the study of the entire universe, where what we think we should see and what we really see doesn’t always match up. This is largely because many cosmological phenomena are difficult to study due to inaccessibility. Cosmological phenomena are usually out of our reach because of the extreme distances involved, or often they have occurred before the human brain had even evolved to worry about them in the first place — such is the case with the big bang.
Project Assistant Professor Seiya Hayakawa and Lecturer Hidetoshi Yamaguchi from the Center for Nuclear Study at the University of Tokyo, and their international team are especially interested in one area of cosmology where theory and observation are very misaligned, and that is the issue of the missing lithium, the cosmological lithium problem (CLP). In a nutshell, theory predicts that in the minutes following the big bang that created all matter in the cosmos, there should be an abundance of lithium around three times greater than what we actually observe. But Hayakawa and his team accounted for some of this discrepancy and have thus paved the way for research that may one day resolve it entirely.
“13.7 billion years ago, as matter coalesced from the energy of the big bang, common light elements we all recognize — hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium — formed in a process we call Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN),” said Hayakawa. “However, BBN is not a straightforward chain of events where one thing becomes another in sequence; it is actually a complex web of processes where a jumble of protons and neutrons builds up atomic nuclei, and some of these decay into other nuclei. For example, the abundance of one form of lithium, or isotope — lithium-7 — mostly results from the production and decay of beryllium-7. But it has either been overestimated in theory, underobserved in reality, or a combination of the two. This needs to be resolved in order to really understand what took place way back then.”
Lithium-7 is the most common isotope of lithium, accounting for 92.5% of all observed. However, even though the accepted models of BBN predict the relative amounts of all elements involved in BBN with extreme accuracy, the expected amount of lithium-7 is around three times greater than what is actually observed. This means there is a gap in our knowledge about the formation of the early universe. There are several theoretical and observational approaches which aim to resolve this, but Hayakawa and his team simulated conditions during BBN using particle beams, detectors and an observational method known as the Trojan horse.
“We scrutinized more than ever before one of the BBN reactions, where beryllium-7 and a neutron decay into lithium-7 and a proton. The resulting levels of lithium-7 abundance were slightly lower than anticipated, about 10% lower,” said Hayakawa. “This is a very difficult reaction to observe since beryllium-7 and neutrons are unstable. So we used deuteron, a hydrogen nucleus with an extra neutron, as a vessel to smuggle a neutron into a beryllium-7 beam without disturbing it. This is a unique technique, developed by an Italian group we collaborate with, in which the deuteron is like the Trojan horse in Greek myth, and the neutron is the soldier who sneaks into the impregnable city of Troy without tipping off the guards (destabilizing the sample). Thanks to the new experimental result, we can offer future theoretical researchers a slightly less daunting task when trying to resolve the CLP.”
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Journal article
S. Hayakawa, M. La Cognata, L. Lamia, H. Yamaguchi, D. Kahl, K. Abe, H. Shimizu, L. Yang, O. Beliuskina, S. M. Cha, K. Y. Chae, S. Cherubini, P. Figuera, Z. Ge, M. Gulino, J. Hu, A. Inoue, N. Iwasa, A. Kim, D. Kim, G. Kiss, S. Kubono, M. La Commara, M. Lattuada, E. J. Lee, J. Y. Moon, S. Palmerini, C. Parascandolo, S. Y. Park, V. H. Phong, D. Pierroutsakou, R. G. Pizzone, G. G. Rapisarda, S. Romano, C. Spitaleri, X. D. Tang, O. Trippella, A. Tumino, and N. T. Zhang, “Constraining the Primordial Lithium Abundance: New Cross-Section Measurement of the 7Be + n Reactions Updates the Total 7Be Destruction Rate” Astrophysical Journal Letters,
Funding
This works was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Nos. 15K17631, 18K13556 and 19K03883). K. Y. C. and S. M. C. were supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (Nos. 2020R1I1A1A01065120, 2020R1A2C1005981, 2019K2A9A2A10018827, and 2016R1A5A1013277). D. K. would like to thank the UK STFC for support. G. G. K. acknowledges the supports by NKFIH (NN128072) and from the Janos Bolyai research fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from UNKP-20-5-DE-2 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities of Hungary. The authors acknowledge Finanziamenti di Linea 2 and Starting Grant 2020 by University of Catania.
Useful links
Center for Nuclear Study
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Laboratori Nazionali del Sud
Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University
Sheesh! All that effort to make devise and perform experiments with careful observations and then update the model for greater accuracy.
It would have been far more straightforward to just alter the original observations to match the models as per climate science.
Well, you learn something new every day…I’d never heard of deuteron before. Always good to expand one’s mind.
Missing lithium eh, hmmm…maybe they need to pay Elon a visit…
It’s just the nucleus of a deuterium (‘heavy’ hydrogen) atom
So it’s a deuterium ion…that I understand. Why don’t they just say so rather than inventing a new word!
They’re government funded, and sesquipedalianism is an implicit part of the grant. Deuterons fall under the category of infrastructure.
It would have been deuterious to their funding.
They were following orders — it was their deuty to do so.
Scotty would not be amused that you knew not of his di-Lithium crystals that powered his warp core reactor.
I cannet hold it together another minute capn…unless I re-route the dilithium crystals.
Capn… hoot, mon, the dilithium crystals be fusin’ back into beryllium!
Must be something lost in translation. They studied how the most common isotope of lithium can form from beryllium decay in order to figure out why 2/3 of the lithium is missing and somehow that explained 10% of the gap. But they didn’t actually do the experiment because it’s hard. So they needed to have a diversion. Let’s talk about Trojan Horses, that’s always interesting. The substitute experiment shows that the rate of Be destruction was 10% less than expected when the neutron is in a deuterium nucleus which I guess is totally the same as a neutron or they made an adjustment calculation that has to be right. And that resolves why the theoretical rate is wrong. Got it.
Oh I see the problem. It’s an article from EurekAlert!
Never mind. Wouldn’t expect that to make sense.
You’ve never studied… Deuteronomy? (rim shot)
Lithium-7, full of surprises since the days of Castle Bravo…
A classic example of theory and practice being poles apart.
I think the Lithium-7 behaved there as predicted. The Lithium-6 was another matter.
No, for some reason Li-7 was not tested for fast neutrons, and when fusion burn started producing those, the deal was done. Li-7 was split to He-4 and H-3 and neutron. Unexpected extra Tritium fuel added to better burn efficiency and produced more fast neutrons causing more fissions in the uranium tamper of the secondary.
Like a deuteron sneaking into Li-7, climate change is the Global socialist’s Trojan Horse to disrupt Western democracies and destroy the affluent middle class in them.
God took it all to make batteries to run the Universe. Simples!
I guess the Sun doesn’t shine and wind blow all the time in Heaven, either.
According to the Revelation, what shines in Heaven is the Son.
As far as I can tell, the number of electrons and protons in the universe closely equal each other. Otherwise the universe would have a net charge which, presumably, we would observe. So, why don’t they mention the extra electron? Why isn’t one of the decay products a hydrogen atom?
Because 20 minutes after the Big Bang the universe was still too hot for stable atoms to form.
It took around 300,000 years before temperatures cooled enough (to ~3000°C IIRC ?) for that to happen.
See “Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation”.
big bang = big lie
Does Poe’s Law apply here ???
.
.
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PS : Just in case it doesn’t, note that in Science the following definition applies.
Paradigm : The hypothesis most experts in the field agree is the least wrong … for now.
Good point.
I’d still like to know what happened to the missing electron. In the temperature, radiation, density, pressure regime that existed then, were the laws of physics different? The above experiment notwithstanding, I’m guessing there’s no way to create those conditions in the laboratory.
Looking for “plasma” led me to the Wikipedia “Photon epoch” page (direct link), which provides as good an explanation as any other I’ve seen :
With electrons being so much lighter than nuclei they move faster at any given temperature, so observers tend to focus on the “slow moving” nuclei and ignore the intermingling (not “missing” …) electrons whizzing around and between them in a quantum-mechanical “probability cloud”.
According to the article, it’s Li-7 that is missing, not Li itself. Li-7 has the same number of electrons as Li.
The story mentions an extra proton but omits any mention of an extra electron.
The laws were the same, but there was sufficient energy (temperature) for everything–including bare protons–to remain ionized. The temperature for complete ionization of hydrogen is a bit above 10,000 K, which is easily reached in the lab.
At the energies involved, no: the Hydrogen is completely ionized, making it a proton. Eventually the proton will slow down and encounter an electron somewhere, and only then will it become Hydrogen.
Hayakawa and his team accounted for some of this discrepancy and have thus paved the way for research that may one day resolve it entirely. (My emphasis)
Delusions of scientist who think they can put the whole cosmos under a microscope.
There is a large distance between missing 2x and finding 10%.
Not really. What the group did was measure the cross section and found that it was lower than previously thought by 10%. And given that the abundance of Lithium depends exponentially on the cross section then a small change in the rate can lead to a large difference in abundance.
Say what?
In their own words…
The predicted abundance (which is about 3x more than observed prior to this theory) was lowered by 10%. So now their tweaked model predicts 90% of the original model’s Li-7 abundance, but reality is (still) only around 33%. So with the new model there is still a 90/33 = 2.7x discrepancy with reality (off by 1.7x).
They have a real crisis on their hands :
The Real Crisis in Cosmology – The Big Bang Never Happened – YouTube
Here Dr. Lerner deals precisely with Lithium, in episode 1.
There is a BBN scorecard, and it grades an F.
What is amazing is the prevailing Narrative has feet of clay. A wag said it is as if the emperor’s elbow shows through, then a toe, then an ear, until a kid says the obvious.
The way out of this impasse, is actual science, actual lab work. Fusion is the driver and it needs funding, not only for great energy benefits but Narrative demolishing. This is the only way to deal with scientism.
Thanks for the link.
Watched all of his “BB is crap” videos, really goes to electromagnetic basis of the universe without going into the electric universe per se. Yes, I think, with my limited knowledge, that the BB IS CRAP. When you need to invent new phenomena to make your theory work, and the new phenomena are disproven by experimentation, then your theory is repeatedly disproven.
Of course the one thing both his perspective/theory and the BB have in common is they both rely on gravity, but neither defines WHAT gravitation is as a force. They can explain what it does, but not HOW it is created.
He is interesting. He is into leftist causes, is seeking funding for fusion, and is playing up the energy crises and AGW BS to get said funding.
It amazes me that an outside the box thinker when cosmological dogma is concerned can accept the global warming dogma for his own benefit. A true indication of the progressive mind, only look at a position with regards to its effect for your personal benefit.
But, being a conservative, I looked at his videos and judged them independently to his politics. I did not scream, he is a BB DENIER, and disbelieve!! A lesson to all our griff, Simon, etc. posters. Be more conservative in your thought, look at WHAT is said, not WHO said it. I read their posts, do a little research when they bring up something new, and then determine if it is their typical blather. 97% of the time it is just BS, the rest there may be some added knowledge FOR ME to review and use.
(The 97% is for the consensus, the reality is 99%+ is BS, generally in the form of goal post moving and cherry picking)
Lerner is an excellent, provocative scientist who also leads the most promising and advanced experimental fusion energy reactor. The novel design of the LPPFusion reactor derives from deep insights into plasmas in nature, project initiated by Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfven.
Promising huh? So like perpetually only 10 years away instead of the conventional 40?
He is one of the few harnessing self-organizing plasma processes. He notes a kind of phase shift in cosmology where plasma dominates, then gravity.
As for funding, the new Biden Infrastructure, like Trump’s , has no place for fusion. This has been going on for decades.
Time for a new Manhattan Program – other countries are already busy.
I like science but this article starts off with a big lie – the big bang… and then a “trojan horse”… GIGO.
Hey ! I like science too !
There has been a peer-reviewed scientific paper that definitely “falsified” TBBT ?!?
I missed that one … do you happen to have a reference (or, even better, a link) ?
Go to the link on Bonbon’s comment above and watch the 8 videos.
You will recognize the simple truths provided, and understand the BB team protects their gravy train the same way the Climate Warriors defend theirs.
So, in much the same way that there appear to be NO “peer reviewed” “scientific” papers disproving the CAGW BS, you will find none for the BB.
big bang = big lie… u know it’s BS. Soooo, TBB THEORY is now fact… not a THEORY, but fact? I suppose you believe in unicorns too, right?
“Soooo, TBB THEORY is now fact… not a THEORY, but fact?”
No, it’s a theory. From my point of view the phrase “scientific fact” is a contradiction in terms.
You are claiming that “X is not a (deliberate, knowing) lie” = “X is a fact“.
Your “logical argument” is flawed.
– – – – – –
Paradigm : The hypothesis most experts in the field agree is the least wrong … for now.
Eric Lerner comes across as a very intelligent individual, but he nevertheless remains an individual.
Are you claiming that his … “conjectures” (?) are absolutely, 100% guaranteed certain, completely and utterly “factual”, right down to the smallest of details ?
Are you claiming that it is impossible for future experimental observations to falsify his version of “the facts” ?
mark, consensus is often wrong (covid, humans are primary cause of warming, BBT)… in each of these cases, when evidence doesn’t coincide with the [consensus] theory, uu either (1) get the off social media, (2) ignore the evidence and keep spouting only data that bolsters your theory, or (3) make stuff up (such as dark matter/energy) so that your math equations still zero out. BBT is a lie and total BS full of untestable variables and unexplainable things (such as hyperinflation made up to explain holesnin the theory).
BTW, what was here before the big bang? what made it expand? how big was it before “exploding”? No need to answer since it’s all a lie.
TBBT is a lie… anytime new observations come out that dont fit into the cosmological puzzle that is TBBT, they .ake stuff up to ensure mathematical formulas remain solvable…. that’s how TBBT now has 95% of the universe being this mystical dark matter/energy you can’t see or test (but is inferred)… I’m not sure if you believe in God or not, but if not, then I say you have found your religion and have plenty of faith 😉
Is there any aspect of the big bang theory that matches observation? The theory had so many holes in it that it should be called the swiss cheese theory.🧀
No. That is Reason’s Theory of Medical Errors.
There are cosmologists who dislike the Big Bang term and instead prefer Expansion of the Universe. But thanks to pop science culture, this is all the general public understands.
Big Bang – 2 syllables
Expansion of the Universe – 7 syllables
Big Bang wins.
I like “Initial Expansion”, but by any other name, the discrepancies between theory and observation still exist.
That’s true for just about everything in cosmology.
The question then becomes, do you have a theory that better fits the known facts?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And, that missing matter? Hypothesized because things are hanging together too much, given the gravity attributable to the mass we see?
Colossians 1:17: “in Him all things hold together.”
The universe is speaking to us, though the deficit of lithium.
It’s saying “don’t use electric cars”.
If there was 3 times the amount of lithium, what would be the effect on human mental health? Maybe this is by design or a challenge by the Creator.
There are hundreds of observational paradoxes, besides the Lithium problem, that kill the big bang theory.
What is required is a succinct summary of the observational paradoxes, to break the paradigm.
This is more on the Lithium problem.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3551v1
….but 7Li observations lie a factor 3 − 4 below the BBN+WMAP prediction. This 4 − 5σ mismatch constitutes the cosmic “lithium problem,” with disparate solutions possible.
For example there is Baryon Asymmetry Paradox also called the Anti-matter problem/paradox.
The Anti matter problem is only a problem for the Big Bang theory. i.e. The Big Bang theory ‘predicts’ that theoretically there should be equal amounts of anti-matter and matter in a big bang created universe.
There is no observational support for the existence of any antimatter in the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry
The baryon asymmetry problem in physics refers to the fact that there is an imbalance in baryonic matter and antibaryonic matter in the observable universe.
Neither the standard model of particle physics, nor the theory of general relativity provide an obvious explanation for why this should be so, and it is a natural assumption that the universe be neutral with all conserved charges.[1]
The Big Bang (William if it happened) should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, as such, there should have been total cancellation of both. In other words, protons should have cancelled with antiprotons, electrons with antielectrons (positrons), neutrons with antineutrons, and so on for all elementary particles.
This would have resulted in a sea of photons in the universe with no matter. Since this is evidently not the case, after the Big Bang, some physical laws must have acted differently for matter and antimatter.
The 2.7C signal is not isotropic Paradox
The 2.7C signal is not Isotropic and has patterns that indicated it is emission from dust that is aligned with a magnetic field paradox.
The Big Bang theory was created based on the assumption that the only natural way astronomers could think of to create the 2.7C signal which is incorrectly called the Cosmic Microwave background signal…..
Is a Big Bang event that created all of the matter in the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
The signal which is called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation …. Should if that signal was caused by a Big Bang event be isotropic.
The 2.7C signal which is incorrectly called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation appears to be caused by dust that surrounds every galaxy. The dust is aligned to a magnetic field which explains why the signal has a dipole and hemispheric asymmetry.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07929.pdf
CMB anomalies after Planck
Among those features is:
1) a lack of both variance and correlation on the largest angular scales,
2) alignment of the lowest multipole moments with one another and with the motion and geometry of the Solar System,
3) a hemispherical power asymmetry or dipolar power modulation,
4) a preference for odd parity modes
5) and an unexpectedly large cold spot in the Southern hemisphere.
Some pairs of those features are demonstrably uncorrelated, increasing their combined statistical significance and indicating a significant detection of CMB features at angular scales larger than a few degrees on top of the standard model. Despite numerous detailed investigations, we still lack a clear understanding of these large-scale features, which seem to imply a violation of statistical isotropy and scale invariance of inflationary perturbations.
Inflation is an invention of Big Bang theorists. ‘Inflation’ is a hypothesized expansion of the universe at 100,000 times faster than the speed of light. This expansion of ‘space’ is called “inflation’.
DARK MATTER search failures
After more than 50 years the direct search for dark matter has been negative which would make sense if dark matter does not exist. And that makes sense as simple direct search for dark matter in the local universe finds there is no dark matter.
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1217/
Serious Blow to Dark Matter Theories?
New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun’s neighbourhood
The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
“I’ve been looking for dark matter for 23, no, 24 years now,” he says. And he is not alone; the search for dark matter has grown into a small industry, albeit one that does not yet have a product to sell. “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the damn stuff really exists. Those fellows,” Gaitskell says, nodding to the pit, “know exactly where the gold is.” I realize now he is not feeling empathy for the miners. He is feeling envy.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E3DB55A34BB36EA723671D1F54905B30/S1323358000001417a.pdf/dark_matter_crisis_falsification_of_the_current_standard_model_of_cosmology.pdf
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology
I wonder about the parallels between dark matter and the “luminiferous aether” proposed prior to the Einstein’s General Theory. If MOND turned out to be correct, it would in some sense complete the parallels. Will be fun to watch and see what happens…
If your ‘eso’ link above is correct, they are finding essentially zero gravitational attraction from supposed dark matter content in the Earth’s vicinity. That is to say, there is zero local gravitational attraction from dark matter, hence zero dark matter. However, the overall motion of the Earth and everything else in our solar system within the galaxy is supposed to be as fast a velocity as it is, precisely because of a significant extra attraction to the galactic center. That is, there is extra acceleration toward the center of the galaxy, hence extra gravitational force in that direction, and thus a very significant dark matter density extending from the galactic center all the way out to our vicinity.
In light of the above, we have both lots of dark matter overall and also *no* dark matter, all at the same time! So, tea and no tea, anyone?
There are several more paradoxes that invalidate the Big Bang Theory. Here’s a further discussion of these flaws revealed by observation and an alternative cosmology.
https://lppfusion.com/science/cosmic-connection/questions-and-answers-on-observations-that-challenge-universal-expansion-hypothesis/
The moral of the story is that in order to mitigate corruption that stems from attachment of special and peculiar interests to pet theories, we need to practice a separation of logical domains, where science is, with cause, notably a philosophy and practice in the near domain.
No lithium problem!
Dark lithium! There, the theory now works.
What I got from this article is that the cosmologist community has had a theory for decades that our universe is missing two thirds (66%) of its lithium since a few minutes after 13.7 billion years ago… But now evidence has been advanced that in fact, its only missing 60%.
I have a hunch that a parallel universe has developed more rapidly than ours, and has been siphoning off our lithium to power its electronic devices, having depleted its own supplies.
Yes, but the amount of fossil fuels they had to burn in that parallel universe in order to draw our lithium into their universe would simply horrify the greens. 😉
I know! I know! Clearly aliens have bipolar disorders in vast quantities and have consumed it all. 😀
Now if only we could figure out how the Solar System has so much phosphorous while the Universe is pretty depleted.