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Universal Big Bang Lithium Deficit Confirmed 171

Posted by samzenpus from the would-you-like-to-try-another-alkali-metal? dept.
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."
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Universal Big Bang Lithium Deficit Confirmed More

Universal Big Bang Lithium Deficit Confirmed

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  • Simple explanation. (Score:5, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @08:08AM (#47879115) Journal
    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.

  • Mined by other civilizations (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11, 2014 @08:09AM (#47879117)

    Civilizations more advanced than our own understood that electric vehicles were the way to go, and they mined it all.

  • Depressing News (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11, 2014 @08:09AM (#47879119)

    This is really depressing news. :-(

  • Lithium, huh? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No wonder the universe is so mentally unbalanced.
  • "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"?

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by geogob ( 569250 )

      Correct wording would have been "Astronomers believe they can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe based on their experience with other elements."

      or something along those lines. The second part, i'm not sure, but the "believe they" really makes the whole point.

      • Re:Quite accurately? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11, 2014 @08:42AM (#47879297)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by geogob ( 569250 )

          To say you can calculate quite accurately an expected value makes no sense a all. I can only understand that they estimate the value using models and believe these models to be accurate. Any other signification is senseless and it would be pointless to argue over it.

          Furthermore, you can't asses the accuracy of an estimation with a model. The model is, as you point it yourself out, what gives the estimated value. Only a measurement can validate the estimation and the model.
          Their models gave prediction for th

          • The models we are talking about is the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis [wikipedia.org]. It accurately calculates the abundance of the other light elements.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Cabriel ( 803429 )

            It should have read

            "Astronomers can calculate quite precisely how much lithium they expect to find..." if they had to use an adjective at all.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by spitzak ( 4019 )

            The model can give a "quite accurate" expected value, even when wrong. Example (note numbers are completely made up):

            Say there is model A which predicts 2.5-2.6% lithium.

            Say there is another model B which predicts 2%-8% lithium.

            Say in reality there is 1% lithium.

            Both models are apprently wrong. But Model A is more "accurate" in making the wrong prediction. Therefore the text in the article is perfectly correct.

            Get it?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by geogob ( 569250 )

              No I don't get it and you are wrong.

              Your example has as nothing to do with accuracy. I'll help you.

              According to Oxford :

              The degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification conforms to the correct value or a standard.

              In other word, the accuracy of a model results tells you how good it represents the real world. What you (and all others who so kindly replied to my original comment) are referring to is precision.

              So, following your example, both model A and B would be inaccurate, but model B would be more precise than model A. Using ISO terminology, model A and B would show a bad trueness, and A would be

    • Re:Quite accurately? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AikonMGB ( 1013995 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @08:37AM (#47879261) Homepage
      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.

    • Re:Quite accurately? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @08:53AM (#47879393)

      "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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PSXer ( 854386 )

      Since the answer of whatever calculation they're using results in the amount of Lithium they expect to find, the two always match exactly. See? Quite accurate!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      There are two things that confuse me with this news.

      1. With a BA in physics (mid-90's), I was taught about the Big Bang and elements calculation multiple times. In every single instance I was shown the calculated and observed percentages, and they were always given as a good match, as part of the proof. I'm really confused that now it's been known for decades that they *don't* match. Were my books lying to me? Was this observation adjusted the year I graduated college, and I just missed the controversy?

      2. I

      • ... If we were just short a bunch of lithium, all of the other elements would be higher, percentage wise ...

        Perhaps there was some mechanism that caused the 'missing' lithium to be created as anti-lithium that would've then been annihilated. No need to invoke additional regular matter.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

          For explaining the lithium's disappearance, maybe, but we do need something to explain the relative proportions.

          My default assumption was as a light element Li would be one of the top numbers. If, say (and these numbers are way off), you were expecting the universe to be 50% hydrogen, 25% helium, 12% lithium, 13% other, and you only had 4% lithium, then that missing 8% would have to be reflected somewhere, and you'd be seeing 54% hydrogen in the universe, for instance.

          Except as I look it up, lithium is very

          • I guess what I was trying to get across was that matter doesn't have to 'show up' as other matter - it could also be converted to energy via matter/anti-matter annihilation. Probably not a likely scenario, just pointing that out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spitzak ( 4019 )

        You may have seen tables of various isotopes of Hydrogen and Helium, those seem to match predictions very well, and there are more than 2 of them, which may be why you are thinking it may go above 2 in the atomic table.

    • "Cosmologists can speculate with high confidence." Everything about that sentence is terrible.
    • Clearly they are not using ECC with ZFS and got a data integrity problem... This is a geek site right?
  • So the accelerated expansion of the universe is fueled by Lithium. Thant's what I always figured. Shrunken minds => expanded space.

    • a few decades ago I had a couple of professors that had expanded the universe between their ears with lithium salts

  • Just maybe... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

  • Maybe most of it is in a form that has a different spectral profile, maybe crystalline, and maybe it's "warpy"

  • Astronomers can calculate quite accurately how much lithium they expect to find in the early Universe,

    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.

  • The missing quantity is bound up as Crystalline Dilithium, which doesn't show up in normal spectroscopic scans.

  • Three times less = negative number! (Score:3)

    by KreAture ( 105311 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @09:18AM (#47879593)
    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!
    • You are wrong: saying "three times less" is perfectly acceptable English. If you have not come across this usage before, I assume you are not a native English speaker, in which case it is probably unwise to comment on what is correct English.
      • I'm a native English speaker, and I also think it's wrong. If you think it's OK, what do "one times less" and "two times less" mean?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      In English, this is one of the terms used for division. Deal with it.

    • 3X Less is equivalent to 1 / 3X. It's like saying 33.333% !

      As far as questionable English goes, this can't be better than not any Double Negatives.

  • "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 c

    • You have to keep in mind that planets are pretty much negligible from a mass balance sheet of anything larger than a stellar system. In our solar system, the Sun makes up between 99.8% and 99.9% of the mass in our solar system.

      I imagine you could pretty much presume all planets to be solid lithium and it wouldn't change much with regards to a 3-fold discrepancy.

  • I guess that disproves the Big Bang Theory! Now what show am I going to watch?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jpvlsmv ( 583001 )

      I guess that disproves the Big Bang Theory! Now what show am I going to watch?

      Maybe try something with a little less scientific rigor... How about COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey

  • I thought this was solved by Korn et al. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Prune ( 557140 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @09:44AM (#47879791)
    http://www.nature.com/nature/j... [nature.com] Can any astro-types chime in on this?

    • So you're saying the Lithium is "running silent, running deep" [imdb.com]?

    • Sounds reasonable to me. The article says that a lot of the Lithium settled into the core of the star via diffusion. The reason the deuterium abundance measurements are not affected by this is that they are not done in stars, but in distant absorbing systems.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by radtea ( 464814 )

      "Solved" isn't a term properly used in the sciences, and your quite legitimate confusion here is a nice example of why.

      Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference. It does not produce certainty, but rather knowledge. Unfortunately, because science is still a very young discipline (only three hundred years old) we have yet to really update our language to accommodate it, so we still talk in terms of "solution" and "proof" and th

  • 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.

    • Considering that the highest half-life so far determined is 790 quintillion years, I'd guess that we'd know if Lithium was that unstable.

      Wouldn't there also then have to be an over-abundance of H and He?

  • I think the Klingons have been taking all the lithium from the galaxy in the form of dilithium crystals.

  • 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 expecte

    • 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".

      • So "100% more" and "2 times more" both mean "double"? My understanding when I was learning word problems many, many moons ago was that "N times more" means (N+1)*original value. On the other hand "N times as much/many" meant N*original value. Are they teaching it differently these days? Not trying to be cheeky, just concerned that the language has changed without me knowing it.

        The phrase "three times less" is frequently used to mean "one third of," but it is ambiguous. I don't think there's much consensus a

    • Man tries to apply logic of maths to languages! Watch at 11 when we point and laugh.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10... [nytimes.com]

  • 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 schem

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • " 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).

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