Hi my name is Ella and i will be
presenting the next few videos.
I just finished my undergraduate
majoring in physics with Honours in
astrophysics,
and spent three weeks in Europe
attending a conference in Rome and
visiting collaborators in Heidelberg and
Stockholm.
Science is driven by data.
Scientists collect data, form ideas based
upon this data,
then communicate their ideas in group
meetings, conferences
and papers.
In communication with others, new ideas are created and the cycle
repeats.
Because of this, science is not static.
Every day, new theories are created and old ones
are ruled out.
it is near impossible to prove that
something is true in nature.
So the best science can do is provide us
with the most likely theories that many
datasets have not ruled out.
For my Honours project, I measured the
abundance of lithium-6,
an isotope of lithium, in a star named
HD-84937.
This star has a long history of
lithium-6 measurements.
In 1993, Verne Smith at the National
Optical Astronomy Observatory
in the United States, measured lithium-6
in HD-84937.
This measurement was confirmed by Lewis
Hopps at the University of Chicago in
the U.S. one year later.
Verne Smith re-measured
HD-84937
in 1998 and still found lithium-6.
This measurement was confirmed by Roger
Cavrell in 1999 at the Observatory of
Paris in France;
Martin Asplund in 2006 at The Australian
National University in Australia;
and Matthias Steffen in 2012 at the
Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in
Germany.
Basically there was a consensus in the
scientific community for almost 20 years
that there is lithium-6 in HD-84937.
This changed in 2013 with the findings
from Karen Lind at the Max Planck
Institute for Astrophysics in Germany.
With the use of better models the
lithium-6 detection in HD-84937
disappeared.
Now I am re-measuring lithium-6 in
HD-84937 with a new technique and even better data.
My preliminary results indicate that
there is no lithium-6. I presented this
at the conference I attended and was
asked "how should the scientific community use
this new information?
What theory should we investigate based
on this finding?"
I believe Karen's and my results
indicate that there is a stellar
solution to the cosmological lithium
problem
as opposed to a nuclear synthesis
solution, but only time will tell if my
conjecture is correct.
Science is constantly evolving. I've been
a part of the change in lithium-6
detection which occurred over the last
25 years.
Science is a human endeavor with
scientists working on many topics from
all over the world.
200 years ago scientists used to be rich
people who could afford not to go to
work and make discoveries.
These days science is a job and
scientists are everyday people from all
walks of life like you and me.
Maybe one day you will be one of the
scientists involved in advancing our
understanding of the universe.
