At the end of September, an international collaboration from Italy, France and the US published yet more bad news for the Big Bang Hypothesis. Observing interstellar gas in the Small Magellan Cloud (SMC), they found the abundance of lithium was a factor of four below Big Bang predictions. The SMC is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. It’s visible in dark skies to the naked eye from the earth’s Southern Hemisphere.
The abundance of lithium is one of the key predictions of the Big Bang. If the universe went through a hot dense phase, then nuclear fusion reactions would have produced a certain amount of lithium: four lithium atoms for every ten billion hydrogen atoms. However, for decades astronomers have known that lithium abundances in old stars are much lower than this prediction. As the stars get older, as indicated by less and less iron in their atmospheres the abundance of lithium shrinks to zero.
This is exactly what was predicted long ago by the non-expanding universe hypotheses, which hypothesize the production of lithium by cosmic rays in existing galaxies. These cosmic rays’ fragments heavier nuclei, such as carbon and oxygen, producing small amount of lithium that are then incorporated into newly formed stars. Since the oldest stars in a galaxy, with the least iron, have formed before there was enough time to accumulate lithium, they have the least amount.
There have been many ad hoc mechanisms prosed trying to explain how the stars destroy the exact right amount of lithium to mimic the non-expanding, galactic origin hypotheses, but all have failed.
The new observations blow an even bigger hole in the Big Bang theory. Using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the team recorded the spectra of Sk143, a very bright star in the SMC. The spectra contain multiple absorption lines from material in the interstellar medium of the satellite galaxy. There is no known or hypothesized mechanism to reduce the amount of lithium in the ISM—stars can only add to the amount. Yet the Li abundance was four times lower than the amount predicted to have been created by the Big Bang. As the authors conclude, this clearly proves that no “depletion mechanism” in stars can fix the Big Bang’s wrong prediction of lithium abundance.
