An international team, including researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, has reached a major milestone in “precision cosmology” by measuring the amount of helium created in the universe’s first five minutes with unprecedented accuracy.

The series of five papers published in The Astrophysical Journal details how the team was able to leverage 130 hours of observation time on the Large Binocular Telescope to reduce the uncertainty of this fundamental cosmic value to just 0.5%—three times better than previous standards.

The study’s findings provide new clues about the beginning of the universe and help researchers better understand the fundamentals of physics. This experiment follows the tradition of testing the Standard Model in physics, which historically has led to technological breakthroughs.