The moments just after the Big Bang happened more like the theory predicts, an international team of scientists using the most powerful telescope on Earth has discovered.
The research has solved cosmological problems that have haunted particle physicists and astrophysicists over the last two decades.
One of the most important problems in physics and astronomy was the inconsistency between the lithium isotopes previously observed in the oldest stars in our galaxy, which suggested levels about two hundred times more Li-6 and about three to five time less Li-7 than Big Bang nucleosynthesis predicts.
This serious problem in the understanding of the early Universe has invoked exotic physics and fruitless searches for pre-galactic production sources to reconcile the differences.
The team, led by Karin Lind of the University of Cambridge, has proven the decades-old inventory relied on lower quality observational data with analysis using several simplifications that resulted in spurious detections of lithium isotopes.
The required data can only be obtained with the largest telescopes on Earth such as the Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii equipped with the powerful High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) spectrograph to disperse the stellar light into its constituent colours and absorption features.
The study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
