Cosmological Deuterium Abundance and the Baryon Density of the Universe

Simple item page
dc.creatorBurles, Scott
dc.creatorTytler, David
dc.date1996-03-15
dc.date1996-03-19
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T09:01:56Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T09:01:56Z
dc.descriptionStandard big bang nucleosynthesis (BBNS) promises accurate predictions of the primordial abundances of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4 and lithium-7 as a function of a single parameter. Previous measurements have nearly always been interpreted as confirmation of the model (Copi, Schramm & Turner 1995). Here we present a measurement of the deuterium to hydrogen ratio (D/H) in a newly discovered high redshift metal-poor gas cloud at redshift $z=2.504$. This confirms our earlier measurement of D/H (Tytler, Fan & Burles 1996), and together they give the first accurate measurement of the primordial D abundance, and a ten fold improvement in the accuracy of the cosmological density of ordinary matter.This is a high density, with most ordinary matter unaccounted or dark, which is too high to agree with measurements of the primordial abundances of helium-4 and lithium-7. Since the D/H measurement is apparently simple, direct, accurate and highly sensitive, we propose that helium requires a systematic correction, and that population II stars have less than the primordial abundance of $^7$Li. Alternatively, there is no concordance between the light element abundances, and the simple model of the big bang must be incomplete and lacking physics, or wrong.
dc.description21 pages, 6 Figures, also available at http://nately.ucsd.edu/ ; submitted to Science. Figures have been slightly revised. Grammatical errors in the text have been corrected
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9603070
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9603070
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/148454
dc.subjectAstrophysics
dc.titleCosmological Deuterium Abundance and the Baryon Density of the Universe
dc.typetext

Files

Collections

arXiv