From Dr. Becky.
AD – To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for 30 days visit https://brilliant.org/DrBecky and you’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription which gives you unlimited daily access to Brilliant. | The Big Bang Theory is nearly perfect, except for one glaring problem – where is all the lithium? According to the theory predictions there should be over three times as much lithium in the Universe than we’ve found with our observations. So is this a case of we’ve been looking in the wrong place for all this lithium and we just haven’t found it yet, or is there something wrong with the predictions that the Big Bang Theory makes for what happened in the first 3 minutes of the Universe’s life?
Fields (2011 review) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.3551
Cyburt, Fields & Olive (2008)- https://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.2818
Dring et al. (1997) – https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/304738
Spite & Spite (1982) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1982A%26A…115..357S
Dunkley et al. (2009) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.0586
Hammache et al. (2013) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.0894
Nollett et al. (1997) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9612197
Borisov et al. (2024) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.15534
Uzan et al. (2003) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0205340
Watch next: All the evidence we have for dark matter – https://youtu.be/nbE8B7zggUg?t=107
00:00 Introduction
01:10 How much Lithium does the Big Bang theory predict?
06:07 How we measure the amount of Lithium with telescopes
10:36 Possible solution I – the astrophysics is wrong
11:48 Possible solution II – the predictions are wrong
12:37 Possible solution III – the physics is wrong
17:50 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about black holes, cosmology, dark matter, the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the biggest unsolved mysteries in astrophysics. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
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