Thursday, September 29, 2016

LITHIUM: THE SEEDS OF GALAXY FORMATION?

     There's a weird property of metals called "cold welding" whereby, in a vacuum, two pieces of the same metal will join together when they come into contact with each other. The description goes as follows:

The reason for this unexpected behavior is that when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to “know” that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin surface layers of contaminants in between, the atoms “know” when they are not on the same part. (Richard Feynman)

    This got me wondering, one of the mysteries of the universe is how large-scale structures like galaxies came to be in the nearly uniform densities of matter produced in the Big Bang. Randomness surely played a role but I get the impression from my readings that such randomness would've been too slow for protogalactic cores to develop into the enormous superclusters of galaxies and voids present in the universe today over a mere 14 billion years.

     Dark matter is called into question as a possible attractor as the hypothesized material, while it has gravity, is only affected by gravity allowing the newly formed matter to gather around its mass whereas ordinary matter is affected by electricity, magnetism, radiation, and subject to gas properties like pressure, temperature, etc.
    The trouble is, while scientists are certain dark matter exists, no one knows what exactly it is making it kind of impossible to test this hypothesis.

     Now I have to believe something like this has been thought of before and discredited but nevertheless I'm putting it forth: what if something more mundane could've led to the creation of galaxies?

     In the first few minutes of the Big Bang, the temperatures and pressures were still sufficient to convert the newly created electrons, protons, and neutrons into the heavier nuclei of deuterium, helium, and a smidge of lithium.
     Of those three elements, lithium is a metal and when the universe became cool enough to allow the formation of atoms after 300,000 years, there would be lithium floating around amidst this ever decreasingly dense gas which I imagine would have formed vacuum-like conditions quite quickly.

     Now if like atoms of metal cold weld for the reason stated above, does it not stand to reason that even the tiny, tiny amount of lithium theorized to have formed during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis would have, through random interactions, found one and other and welded together forming ever larger seeds to acts as attractants to the far more enormous amounts of hydrogen, deuterium, and helium out there?

     I would like to believe that over the millions of years between recombination and the first stars, there was plenty of time for atoms of lithium to make clumps of anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of atoms which would have collectively more concentrated gravity than the surrounding material which doesn't particularly enjoying interacting with one and other.
     Helium is famously unreactive and hydrogen is content once it finds a partner to bond with. Neither will naturally clump...but lithium would...and might that be enough to begin the slow process of gathering ever larger clouds of gas together to form the first stars and protogalaxies?

     I honestly don't know...but I like the idea.

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