|
Never would have contemplated discussing the Big Bang on a BMW forum, but the world has changed. The JWST didn’t disprove the Big Bang, the question it raised was how could some of the massive “structures” seen in the images have formed so early. Personally, I believe that is just a gap in our current theory, but there is so much more that “proves” the singularity, than this one question of the size of some clumps of matter.
Perhaps, for me, the most tangible proof point is the ratio(s) of early element creation that still are still constant today. One of the most interesting processes in nucleosynthesis for the BB was the “deuterium bottleneck”…basically, hydrogen formed first, but because the environment was so hot (energetic), as deuterium tried to form, it was quickly annihilated by high energy protons…so it delayed all other building block elements from forming. This fixed the ratios of particles and elements that exist today.
From WIKI……As the universe expands, it cools. Free neutrons are less stable than helium nuclei, and the protons and neutrons have a strong tendency to form helium-4. However, forming helium-4 requires the intermediate step of forming deuterium. Before nucleosynthesis began, the temperature was high enough for many photons to have energy greater than the binding energy of deuterium; therefore any deuterium that was formed was immediately destroyed (a situation known as the "deuterium bottleneck"). Hence, the formation of helium-4 is delayed until the universe became cool enough for deuterium to survive (at about T = 0.1 MeV); after which there was a sudden burst of element formation. However, very shortly thereafter, around twenty minutes after the Big Bang, the temperature and density became too low for any significant fusion to occur. At this point, the elemental abundances were nearly fixed, and the only changes were the result of the radioactive decay of the two major unstable products of BBN, tritium and beryllium-7.
|