Shedding new light on the land of the shadows of the universe
We live in a mysterious universe, most of which we cannot see. What is it made of and has its composition changed over time? Starlit galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters are embedded within invisible halos made up of transparent material that scientists refer to as the “dark matter.” This mysterious substance creates a huge and invisible structure in all of Space and Time: a fabulous and fantastic tapestry of heavy filaments composed of this “dark” matter, believed to be formed from exotic non-atomic particles and unidentified. In March 2020, a team of scientists announced that they had identified a subatomic particle that could have formed the dark matter in the Universe during his Big Bang birth.
Scientists think that up to 80% of the Universe could be dark matter, but despite years of research, its origin remains an enigma. Although it cannot be observed directly, most astronomers think that this ghostly form of matter is actually there because it gravitationally dances with forms of matter that can be observed, such as stars and planets. This invisible material is made up of exotic particles that do not emit, absorb or reflect light.
A team of nuclear physicists at the University of York (UK) is now proposing a new candidate particle for this ghostly material, a particle they have recently detected called star-d hexaquark.
Tea d-star hexaquark consists of six quarks– the fundamental particles that normally combine in triplets to form the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus.
Raise a quark for the reunion mark
Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941) had a drunk character in Finnegan’s awakening Raise a quart of stout to toast a man named Finnegan who had just died. He wrongly said “raise a quark for muster Mark. “The American physicist, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019), who was one of the scientists who proposed the existence of the quark In 1964, he thought it was so funny that he named this subpart after the drunken host. The Russian-American physicist, George Zweig, also independently proposed the existence of the quark that same year.
FOR quark it is a type of elementary particle that is a fundamental constitution of matter. Quarks combine to create composite particles called hadrons. Hadrons are subatomic particles of a type that includes protons and neutrons who can participate in the strong interaction that holds the atomic nuclei together. In fact, the most stable hadrons is it so protons and neutrons– the components that make up the nuclei of atoms. Due to a phenomenon called color containment, quarks they have not been observed directly nor have they been found in isolation. For this reason, they have only been found in hadrons. Because of this, much of what scientists have learned about quarks has been derived from studying hadrons.
Quarks they also display certain intrinsic properties, including mass, color, electrical charge, and spin. They are the only known elemental particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics to show the four fundamental interactions, also called fundamental forces–tea strong interaction the weak Interaction, gravitation, and electromagnetism. Quarks they are also the only known elementary particles whose electric charges are not integral multiples of the elementary charge.
The types of quarks are known as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. The heaviest quarks rapidly undergo a metamorphosis into until and quarks down as a result of a process called particle disintegration. Particle disintegration refers to the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. For this reason, until and quarks down they are stable, as well as the most abundant in the Universe. Unlike, strange, charm, background, and top quarks It can only occur in high-energy collisions, such as those involving cosmic rays or particle accelerators. For each quark flavor there is a corresponding antiquark. Tea antiquark antiparticle differs from quark only in certain properties, such as electrical charge. Tea antiquark antiparticle they have the same magnitude but an opposite sign.
There was little evidence of the physical existence of quarks until deep inelastic scattering experiments were carried out in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1968. Experiments with accelerators have provided evidence for the existence of all six flavors. Tea upper quark, first observed in Fermilab in 1995, it was the last to be discovered.
The land of the shadows of the universe
It is often said that most of our Universe is “lost”, made up mainly of an unidentified substance known as dark energy. The mysterious dark energy it is causing the Universe to accelerate in its expansion, and it is believed to be a property of Space itself.
The most recent measurements indicate that the Universe is composed of approximately 70% dark energy and 25% dark matter. Currently, both the origin and nature of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy are unknown. A considerably smaller fraction of our Universe is made up of so-called “ordinary” atomic matter. “Ordinary” atomic matter, which is really extraordinary, is comparatively rare. However, it is the material that accounts for all the elements listed in the familiar Periodic table. Despite being the tiny “dwarf” of the cosmic litter of three, “ordinary” atomic matter is what makes up stars, planets, moons and people, everything that humans on Earth are dealing with. more familiar. It is also the precious form of matter that caused life to form and evolve in the Universe.
On the largest scales, the Universe looks the same wherever it is observed. It shows a bubbly and frothy appearance, with huge and extremely massive filaments composed of dark matter intertwining with each other, creating a network-like structure known as the Cosmic web. The ghostly and transparent filaments of the great Cosmic web are traced by myriads of galaxies that blaze with the fires of brilliant starlight, thus outlining the immense intertwined braids of dark matter that contain the galaxies of the visible Universe. Huge, cavernous, dark and almost empty Empty disrupts this network-like pattern. Tea Empty they host few galaxies, and this is why they appear to be completely empty. In dramatic contrast, the massive star-lit filaments of the Cosmic web are woven around these almost empty Empty, creating a fabulous, complicated braided knot.
Some cosmologists have proposed that the entire large-scale structure of the Universe is actually made up of a single filament and a single filament. Empty twisted together in an intricate and complex tangle.
Enter the d-star Hexaquark
Tea d-star hexaquark consists of six quarks. These fundamental particles normally combine in triplets to form the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus. More importantly, the six quarks in a d-star hexaquark create a boson particle. This indicates that when a large number of d-star hexaquarks They are present that can dance together and combine in very different ways than protons and neutrons. FOR boson it is a particle that carries energy. For instance, photons is it so bosons.
The team of scientists at the University of York propose that under the conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang, a multitude of d-star hexaquarks could have come together and then combined when the Universe cooled from its original extremely hot state and then expanded to give rise to a fifth state of matter, which is called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
FOR Bose-Einstein condensate It is a state of matter in which separate atoms or subatomic particles, cooled to almost absolute zero, merge into a single quantum entity, that is, one that can be described by a wave function, on an almost macroscopic scale.
Dr. Mikhail Bashkanov and Dr. Daniel Watts from the Department of Physics at the University of York published the first assessment of the feasibility of this new dark matter candidate.
Dr. Watts noted on a March 3, 2020 York University Press Release that “The origin of dark matter in the Universe is one of the most important questions in science and one that, until now, has been left blank. “
“Our first calculations indicate that the condensation of d-stars are a new feasible candidate for dark matter and this new possibility seems worthy of a more in-depth and detailed investigation, “he added.
“The result is particularly exciting as it does not require any concept that is new to physics,” Dr. Watts continued.
Co-author Dr. Bashkanov explained in the same York University Press Release that “The next step to establish this new dark matter candidate will gain a better understanding of how the d-stars interact: when they attract and when they repel each other. We are teaching new measures to create d-stars inside an atomic nucleus and see if their properties are different from when they are in free space. “
The scientists now plan to collaborate with researchers in Germany and the United States to test their new theory of.dark matter and hunt d-star hexaquarks In the universe.