Why is there less lithium than the Big Bang promised? express
In the first minutes after the Big Bang, the Universe was like a blazing hot stove. On it, according to the 'recipe' of the standard theory, hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium were supposed to cook. But telescopes see only a third of the lithium that this recipe calls for. For half a century, astrophysicists have been searching for the missing ingredient.
The key turned out to be beryllium-7 — an unstable precursor nucleus that quickly turns into lithium-7. If it collides with another particle before transforming, it disappears forever. The new calculation shows that such 'side reactions' are far more common than thought. Usually, electron capture was considered, but the authors added rarely discussed processes — from proton capture to interaction with antineutrinos. In the hot, dense 'primordial soup' of the early Universe, these rare channels worked almost ten times faster than previous estimates.
Beryllium-7 vanished so rapidly that lithium simply didn't have time to be born in the predicted quantities. If the calculations are correct, the lithium puzzle is solved — the recipe finally matches the observations. And every lithium atom that survived from that time now hides in the batteries of our gadgets.
Lithium-7 is hardly created in stars — unlike carbon or iron. Almost every atom of it is a contemporary of the Universe, born in the first minutes after the Big Bang, and now it powers your smartphone.
In science fiction, lithium is a strategic fuel. In Star Trek, dilithium crystals power warp drives, but the scriptwriters remain silent on how this metal appeared in the Universe.