Abstract
Of the light elements, the primordial abundance of deuterium relative to hydrogen, (D/H)p, provides the most sensitive diagnostic1 for the cosmological mass density parameter, ΩB. Recent high-redshift D/H measurements are highly discrepant2,3,4,5,6, although this may reflect observational uncertainties7,8. The larger primordial D/H values imply a low ΩB (requiring the Universe to be dominated by non-baryonic matter), and cause problems for galactic chemical evolution models, which have difficulty in reproducing the steep decline in D/H to the present-day values. Conversely, the lower D/H values measured athigh redshift imply an ΩB greater than that derived from 7 Li and 4 He abundance measurements, and may require a deuterium-abundance evolution that is too low to easily explain. Here wereport the first measurement of D/H at intermediate redshift(z = 0.7010), in a gas cloud selected to minimize observational uncertainties. Our analysis yields a value of D/H ((2.0 ± 0.5) × 10−4) which is at the upper end of the range of values measured at high redshifts. This finding, together with other independent observations, suggests that there may be inhomogeneity in (D/H)p of at least a factor of ten.
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Acknowledgements
This work is based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract. K.M.L. was supported by NASA, STScI and NSF; M.L. was supported by NASA, DoE and NSF at the University of Chicago; J.K.W. thanks M. Ashley, J. Barrow, A.Little and R. J. Tayler for discussions, and SUN Microsystems Australia Pty Ltd for providing computing facilities for this work.
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Webb, J., Carswell, R., Lanzetta, K. et al. A high deuterium abundance at redshift z = 0.7. Nature 388, 250–252 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/40814
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/40814
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