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Science 7 June 1996:
Vol. 272. no. 5267, pp. 1429 - 1431
DOI: 10.1126/science.272.5267.1429
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Special News Report

James Glanz

Seconds to minutes after the big bang, as the universe cooled to less than 10 billion kelvin, neutrons and protons began clinging together into the hydrogen isotope called deuterium, which went on to fuse into helium and a trace of lithium. The remnants of that primordial puff of matter give astronomers their earliest probe of the big bang, the closest look they can have at creation itself. In the last 2 years, powerful new instruments including the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii have allowed astronomers to measure the amount of deuterium left in the early universe by that first burst of element creation. The deuterium abundance acts as a sensitive "baryometer" that can tell how much ordinary matter was forged in the big bang. But the two measurements made so far are strangely at odds. For detailed information about the measurements, see http://www.astro.washington.edu/rugers/res.html and http://nately.ucsd.edu ; for theory, see http://astro.uchicago.edu/index.html and http://www-astro-theory.fnal.gov/.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)