The ‘Genesis Code’. Courtesy/LANL
A few years ago, Mark Paris, a physicist in the Nuclear and Particle, Astrophysics and Cosmology Group at Los Alamos had some questions about nuclear reactions and a colleague suggested he take a look at BBN.
BBN, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is the name given to a sliver of a time, no more than a few minutes at the beginning of the 13.8 billion-year lifespan of our universe that provides cosmological evidence for the concept that everything we know in the universe can be traced back to a sudden, furious expansion of an infinitesimalpoint in a vacuum of space.
Knowledge of the BBN, roughly the first few minutes of creation, isone of the ways the physics of the early universe has corroborated the concept that the universe began with a sudden, extremely hot eruption of matter. This profound event created subatomic particles andprimitive energetic materials that would jostle and fuse themselves into more complex elements. Over immense periods of time the atomic and molecular agglomerations of these materials would become planets, stars and galaxies, the most visible objects in the universe.
Paris and a team of researchers, including colleague Evan Grohs and University of California San Diego physicist George Fuller have created a computer code, known as BURST that is specifically designed to study the BBN in the early universe.
One might assume that BURST is an acronym that that makes a comprehensive statement about the code, but in fact it is a set of letters that serve as device for remembering key elements of the code.
These features include: the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, a rich trove of research for students of the early universe; Unity, which is to say, conservation, and the fundamental principles of mechanics; Recombination, from BBN to the Cosmic Microwave Radiation Background, an early blueprint of the Universe in the process of becoming – what did it take to get there; Self-consistent, concurrent solutions to the mathematical problems, not a piece of the problem solved here and plugged in over there; and Transport, which involves the influence of variable conditions on comparable physical phenomena, a special feature the researcher are counting on to refine the precision of current calculations that have a lot to do with abundances and ratios of the material elements in the universe.
As the universe cooled, the rate of nuclear reactions slowed down. What began as a super-piping-hot stew of subatomic heavy ions and quark-gluons turned in a flash into the light elements of hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium. “By about 300 seconds, BBN is done,” Paris says.
All this material continued to expand and grow more transparent for about 380,000 years, when the oldest light in the universe broke out of its murky, soup of mostly hydrogen atoms, and left a glow that intelligent life in the universe could not miss.
A key element of the BURST simulation is that whatever happened in the first few minutes that was BBN had to end up encoded in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
CMBR was discovered by Bell Labs radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964 and written up the next year in a paper on “excess antenna temperature” in a region of the heavens that measured 3 degrees warmer than the typical near-absolute zero that might be expected. The subtle variations in the light texture or temperature imprinted were imprinted long ago on the night sky. This was what was left of the Big Bang and would become the architecture of the night sky.
A new family of observatories is lining up for work in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, beginning with the Giant MagellanTelescope, which will be a 24.5 meter telescope. It will be followed by the Thirty Meter Telescope, a U.S. project, and then the European Extremely Large Telescope with a nearly 40 meter diameter.
The E-ELT will collect 13 times more light than the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Even peering through the Earth’s gauzy atmosphere, the telescope’s images will be 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
One of the main purposes of the project is to get the reactions and interactions of the BBN down to sub-percent accuracy. That is, much more precise than the 5 percent or 10 percent accuracy that is prevalent, something under 1 percent“
“You’re going to get some precision data on these cosmological observables,” Paris said, relishing the thought of the new information that will be arriving with the age of the extremely large telescopes.
