🚀 go-pugleaf

joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joe Wang) writes:
>Now, current estimates of the primordial helium abundance give about
>25%+/-10%.  It's the plus or minus 10% which is interesting.  If
>better measurements indicate that the early helium abundance is less
>than 20%, the Big Bang has big, big problems.

True.  On the other hand I don't think anyone has actually claimed
to have found an object with less than 20-some percent helium.
(Asteroids excluded :-)  But also, nobody has found any stars or
other objects with absolutely zero metallicity.  This is annoying,
because it means that metals have to be synthesized before globular
cluster stars form, which probably means during galaxy formation,
and I'm not sure there are any real good ideas for doing that.
Supercolossal stars, etc., seem somewhat contrived.  Maybe giant
amounts of shock heating would do it.  (The problem is that you
have to get some kind of hot thing to make the metals - e.g. so-
called Population III stars; but then you have to make it go away,
because we don't see it now.  If Pop III included small, slightly 
under solar mass stars, they would still be around.)

Note to the original poster: There are a lot of alternative models;
most of them have at least one glaring deficiency.  Why don't you
check out I.E. Segal's chronometric cosmology (heh heh).