Scientists One Step Closer to Proving Big Bang Theory

Scientists at the European Southern Observatory found a long-missing piece of the puzzle that is the universe's history when they discovered lithium had been ejected from a nova.

The European Southern Observatory, based at La Silla Observatory near Santiago, Chile detected lithium in the novae explosion of Centaur 2013, which was so bright that it could even be seen with the naked eye. Novae are explosions that send material hurtling into space and form the basis for the next generation of stars.

The detection of large amounts of lithium confirmed a hypothesis that began in the 1970s and speculated that the lithium detected in both young and old stars had its origins in novae, as older stars have less lithium than their younger counterparts. While this made sense on the surface of things, it could not be proven definitively, until now.

Data collected at La Silla Observatory at the time of the Centaur 2013's nova event revealed that the explosion sent lithium out into space at speeds of 2 million kilometers per hour.

Co-author of the study where the findings were published Massimo Della Valle said, "It is a very important step forward. If we imagine the history of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way as a big jigsaw, then lithium from novae was one of the most important and puzzling missing pieces. In addition, any model of the Big Bang can be questioned until the lithium conundrum is understood."

It has also been theorized that lithium was one of the elements created in the Big Bang, but scientists have also been unable to prove that theory either and this new evidence is the most concrete yet to support the idea.

"It is very exciting," says Luca Izzo, who led the team of researchers who made the discovery, "to find something that was predicted before I was born and then first observed on my birthday in 2013!"