Light elements add weighty burden to crisis in cosmology

A bedrock prediction of the Big Bang theory has been contradicted by abundant observations, according to a new study to be reported at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, deepening the already widely discussed crisis in cosmology. The study, by Eric J. Lerner, Chief Scientist at LPPFusion, Inc., looks at the origin and abundance of three key light elements that are hypothesized to have been created by the Big Bang.

Precise amounts of helium, deuterium and lithium are predicted to have been formed by fusion reactions in the dense, extremely hot initial instants of the Big Bang. In the study, which Lerner is presenting on Wednesday, January 8 (11:20 am HST, Room 312), these predictions are compared with decades of increasingly exact observations.

For both lithium and helium, the study shows, observations of abundances in old stars now differ from predictions by more than a dozen standard deviations, and the gap has been widening at an accelerating pace.

The oldest stars have less than half the helium and less than one tenth the lithium than that predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory. The lowest lithium levels observed are less than 1% that predicted by the theory. Indeed, the evidence is consistent with no helium or lithium having been formed before the first stars in our galaxy.

Equally important, the study shows that the right amounts of these light elements have been predicted by an alternative explanation, which hypothesizes that these elements were produced by stars in the earliest stages of the evolution of galaxies.

This alternative explanation, which Lerner calls the Galactic Origin of Light Elements or GOLE hypothesis, derives from theoretical expectations that the first generation of stars to form in a galaxy are intermediate-mass stars that are from 4 to 12 times as massive as the Sun.

These stars burn hydrogen to helium in tens to a couple of hundred million years, much faster than our Sun's burn rate of ten billion years. The helium then disperses in powerful stellar winds during the late stages of these stars' lifetimes. Cosmic rays from these early stars, colliding at high energy with other nuclei, produce deuterium and lithium.

The new study includes new calculations based on this GOLE hypothesis that show that not only do early stars produce the observed amounts of helium, deuterium and lithium, but that they also produce other elements such as carbon, boron and beryllium in the amounts observed in the oldest stars.

"The GOLE hypothesis was first published in a full form in my own paper in 1989 and had been discussed by others even earlier," explains Lerner. "Those published predictions have been confirmed by decades of subsequent observations, unlike the predictions of the Big Bang hypothesis. The new work that I am reporting at this conference makes the predictions more precise and is based on the much more extensive knowledge we now have of stellar evolution."

These conclusions, based on observations of old stars in our galaxy, are strengthened by recent observations of the conditions in newly formed galaxies. These galaxies are ultra-luminous, converting hydrogen to helium at hundreds of times the rate of our galaxy at present. Work by other researchers published in the last year show that their luminosity is driven by stars of about 8 solar masses and above, as had been predicted by the GOLE hypothesis.

"The correct predictions of the GOLE model not only fit the observations far better than does the Big Bang model" Lerner points out. "The production of the light elements by stars must occur - and if there was also production by a Big Bang, we would observe far more of these light elements than we do."

Many of the conflicts between Big Bang theory and observations that are emphasized in the new study have been known for some time, especially the "lithium problem." But most cosmologists have dismissed them as "anomalies" in an otherwise sound Big Bang, "concordance cosmology" theory. On the contrary, Lerner contends that the light elements results join the better-known Hubble-constant and closed-universe problems in a long list of contradictions between Big Bang theory and observations.

"The Big Bang should have resulted in the annihilation of matter and antimatter, leaving a surviving density of matter that would be a hundred billion times less than that observed," Lerner points out.

"To avoid that outcome, Big Bang theory requires an asymmetry of matter and antimatter with consequences, such as the decay of the proton, which have been contradicted by extensive experiments. In addition, an expanding universe should lead to declines in the surface brightness of distant galaxies - but those have not been observed either, as I and my colleagues have shown in published papers. The list of contradictions goes on and on. For cosmology to advance, the basic hypothesis of the Big Bang has to be abandoned. The real crisis in cosmology is that the Big Bang never happened."

Related Links
LPPFusion
Understanding Time and Space

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