Pristine Big Bang Gas Found 220
New submitter cekerr sends this quote from Discovery News:
"U.S. scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which contain only original elements created moments after the universe's birth (abstract). Unlike everything else in the universe, the gas clouds have never mingled with elements forged later in stars. The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion, some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed."
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But what did it sound like? (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's hydrogen and hydrogen. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, not helium.
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:2, Informative)
False. Many religions are not organized, and many organizations based around ideologies are not religions.
False. There is no organization that represents even a significant minority of atheists, let alone all of them. There is no atheist equivalent of the Catholic Church.
False. Lack of belief in a god is not an ideology.
Then you are either ignorant or lying.
Re:The whole universe was in a hot, dense state... (Score:4, Informative)
Three verses. One of the few MP3s I've purchased from Amazon.
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unravelling the mystery,
That all started with the big bang! BANG!
Since the dawn of man is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time
than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and Pangaea
See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!
Set in motion by the same big bang!
It all started with a big BANG!
It's expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause, then start to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward,
we won't be here, it wont be heard
Our best and brightest figure that
it'll make an even bigger bang!
Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating how we're here,
they're catching deer (we're catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Encarta, Deuteronomy
It all started with a big bang!
Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with a big bang!
It all started with a big BANG!
Re:Isotopes != elements (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen and helium isotopes (and a little bit of lithium and beryllium) are made in the Big Bang. Everything heavier is made in stars. So these pure clouds can exist only as long as there are no stars nearby to pollute them with heavier elements. Stars are common in the modern universe, which is why it has been so hard to find such clouds.
Radon in particular is made in supernova explosions (and by the decay of radioactives which were made in supernova explosions) and there is no natural mechanism to separate it back out from mixtures of supernova debris. So in a sense, yes, if a massive, primordial, pure radon cloud was out there, it would disprove the Big Bang theory's prediction of nucleosynthesis, which can only make light elements.
Re:Seems like not that long... (Score:5, Informative)
Large bright stars don't last nearly as long as smaller dimmer ones like the Sun, and it's the big ones that actually explode at the end of their lives and spray heavy elements into the interstellar medium, so, especially in the early life of a galaxy, gas may get processed through many generations of big stars.
Re:A question. (Score:5, Informative)
If the big bang was more energetic than as supernova why did it only create Hydrogen and Helium? Why not at least some Lithium?
Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, but in very tiny amounts, less than a part per billion. No heavier elements were produced because of a "bottleneck" caused by the fact that there are no stable nuclei with atomic mass 5 or 8. Massive stars get around this bottleneck by the triple-alpha [wikipedia.org] process, i.e. by three-body collisions of helium, which requires higher temperatures and longer time scales than were available in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which lasted only a few minutes.
Re:Seems like not that long... (Score:4, Informative)
The average star age is 1-10 billion years
Very massive stars don't last nearly as long.
From source http://www.universetoday.com/25160/how-long-do-stars-last/ [universetoday.com]
"The mass of a star defines its lifespan. The least massive stars will live the longest, while the most massive stars in the Universe will use their fuel up in a few million years and end in a spectacular supernova explosion. So, how long do stars last?" ...
"How long do stars last? The biggest stars last only millions, the medium-sized stars last billions, and the smallest stars can last trillions of years."
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:3, Informative)
But... you don't seem to understand. You see, the sky daddy has a son, a cosmic Jewish zombie who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.