Big Bang ruled out as origin of lithium-6

Collisions between hydrogen and helium nuclei deep under a mountain in Italy have confirmed a mystery of cosmic proportions: why the amount of lithium-6 observed in today's universe is so different from the amount that theory predicts was produced shortly after the Big Bang. Working at the Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics (LUNA) at Gran Sasso, an international team of researchers has measured for the first time how fast lithium-6 is produced under conditions similar to those when the universe was a few minutes old. The measured rate suggests that almost all lithium-6 was actually produced well after the Big Bang – something that current theories of nucleosynthesis cannot explain.