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Exploding 'laptop batt' IN SPAAACE! Speeding lithium spaffed by nova

One step closer to cracking riddle of light metal's origins

Pic For the first time, astronomers have detected lithium spread across space at high speed by an exploding star. The eggheads hope this discovery will solve one of the chemical riddles of the universe.

Using telescopes in Chile, an Italian team focused on Nova Centauri 2013, a nova whose light reached Earth two years ago. It is described as the brightest nova so far this century: it was easily visible to the naked eye on our planet.

The astronomers spotted lithium streaming away from the explosion at two million kilometres per hour (1.24 million MPH).

The creation of lithium in supernovae and novae has been predicted for more than 25 years, but never observed until now.

"It is very exciting," said team leader Luca Izzo, from the Sapienza University of Rome, "to find something that was predicted before I was born, and then first observed on my birthday in 2013!"

It's thought that lithium (and other chemical elements) were formed in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Older stars don't contain very much lithium, while younger stars stash up to ten times as much of the light metal, which has left some astroboffins puzzled.

It was thought that perhaps younger stars absorb their lithium from supernovae and novae. The latest observation, published in detail in Astrophysical Journal Letters this month, is significant because it lends weight to that theory.

Nova Centauri 2013

Your laptop's lithium-ion battery's main component has come a long, long way

"It is a very important step forward," said Massimo Della Valle, who cowrote the published paper on the findings. "If we imagine the history of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way as a big jigsaw, then lithium from novae was one of the most important and puzzling missing pieces. In addition, any model of the Big Bang can be questioned until the lithium conundrum is understood."

The amount of lithium detected coming out of Nova Centauri 2013 is relatively small: it is estimated to be less than a billionth of the mass of our Sun (whose mass is just under 2,000 billion billion billion kilograms.)

So, the next time you curse your failing laptop battery, don't forget to ponder where exactly those lithium ions came from – huge explosions billions of miles away, probably. ®

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