🌅 The Smallest Scale of Nature Ever Explored

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SOURCE

Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory

WHAT TO KNOW

• An international team of researchers using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva captured evidence of an ultra-rare event in which a subatomic particle called a beauty meson decayed to produce two even smaller particles called muons. The discovery follows more than 40 years of searching and could help physicists develop a new, more complete theory of how the universe works. It also represents the first evidence detected from the smallest scale of nature ever explored, around 100 billion times smaller than an atom.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Beauty meson particles exist for less than 2 trillionths of a second before decaying, and only one out of every 10 billion of the particles decays this way, making the event incredibly difficult to detect according to our current understanding of the laws of physics. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to the zeptoverse, an unexplored world that exists at distances of a billionth of a trillionth of a meter (called a “zeptometer”), where new particles and forces of nature may lurk. Experts believe exploring the zeptoverse could help unravel several scientific mysteries, including the nature of dark matter and how exactly matter came into existence during the Big Bang.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Dark matter is the name given to the invisible “glue” that holds the universe together and makes up most of the matter within it (about 27% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, compared to just 5% that’s regular matter; the rest is believed to be made of mysterious dark energy). Scientists believe dark matter and regular matter were thinly distributed when the universe began, and that dark matter started clumping together first. Those dark matter clumps then pulled in regular matter, creating the dense regions where stars and galaxies began to form. In this way, dark matter actually determined the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the universe.