Did scientists solve a 13-billion-year-old mystery by reconstructing the universe's first molecule? Can the chemistry of the past be found? Can humans prove the relativity of the universe according to Einstein and Hubble? How provable are the new theories of the universe's chemistry?

Scientists have succeeded in reconstructing the first molecule that was created after the formation of the universe. A molecule that, they say, played a much more important role than previously thought in the birth of early stars.

Scientists solve a 13-billion-year-old mystery by reconstructing the universe's first molecule

According to the Student News Agency University Group, about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was extremely hot and dense in its initial moment; but only a few seconds later it cooled and the first elements of existence, hydrogen and helium, were formed in a fully ionized state.

It took nearly 380,000 years for the temperature of the early universe to drop enough for neutral atoms to form and the first chemical reactions to begin.

The first molecule to form in this way, the researchers believe, was the helium hydride ion (HeH⁺), a molecule composed of a neutral helium atom and ionized hydrogen.

The creation of this molecule initiated a chain that eventually led to the formation of molecular hydrogen (H₂), the most common molecule in the universe.

Scientists say this ancient molecule played an important role in the cooling of the early universe, a process that took hundreds of millions of years and paved the way for the formation of the first stars.

Without such a mechanism, they believe, the early gas clouds could not have been compressed enough to initiate nuclear fusion and star formation.

For the first time, conditions similar to those of more than 13 billion years ago have been recreated in the Cryogenic Storage Loop laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany.

In this experiment, the researchers stored helium hydride ions in a 35-meter ring at a temperature of a few kelvins (about minus 267 degrees Celsius) and bombarded them with a beam of neutral hydrogen atoms. They then measured the collision rates at different temperatures.

Contrary to previous predictions, the results showed that the reaction rate did not decrease with decreasing temperature.

"Previous theories expected that the probability of reaction would decrease sharply at low temperatures, but our experiment and new calculations show that this is not the case," said Dr. Holger Kerkel of the Max Planck Institute.

The findings suggest that the reactions of helium hydride ions with hydrogen were much more important in the chemistry of the early universe than previously thought.

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