"Relic" Particles Discovered Spanning the Universe -Each Larger Than Thousands of Galaxies
An ancient subatomic signature extends across the universe. It seems
that some subatomic particles, invisible and untouchable effects of the
very creation of reality, might exist simultaneously across all of
space. We're honestly surprised people who say science is boring don't
spontaneously combust from the foolishness of their statements.
"Relic" neutrinos, like the relic photons that make up the cosmic microwave background, are leftovers from the hot, dense early universe that prevailed 13.7 billion years ago. But over the lifetime of the cosmos, these relic neutrinos have been stretched out by the expansion of the universe, enlarging the range in which each neutrino can exist.
Of course there's a little bit of physics involved when you talk about particles pouring out of the beginning of time. Neutrinos are tiny, almost undetectable neutral particles which stream through pretty much everything, ever. Over one hundred trillion have passed through you while reading this sentence. Most of those came from nuclear reactions, but a blast wave of neutrinos were also released shortly after the big bang and are, we presume, still going strong.
"We're talking maybe up to roughly ten billion light-years" for each neutrino, said study co-author George Fuller of the University of California, San Diego. "That's nearly on the order of the size of the observable universe." These oldest of the subatomic particles might each encompass a space larger than thousands of galaxies, new simulations suggest.
While trying to calculate masses for neutrinos, Fuller and his student Chad Kishimoto found that, as the universe has expanded, the fabric of space-time has been tugging at ancient neutrinos, stretching the particles' ranges over vast distances.
Such large ranges can remain intact, the scientists suggest in the May 22 issue of Physical Review Letters, since neutrinos pass right through most of the universe's matter. The big question is whether gravity—say, the pull from an entire galaxy—can force a meganeutrino to collapse down to a single location.
"Quantum mechanics was intended to describe the universe on the smallest of scales, and now here we're talking about how it works on the largest scales in the universe," Kishimoto said. "We're talking about physics that hasn't been explored before."
According to physicist Adrian Lee at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not part of the study team, "gravity is a real frontier these days that we don't really understand. "These neutrinos could be a path to something deeper in our understanding with gravity."
Although they should be extraordinarily common in the universe, the relic neutrinos now have only about one ten-billionth of the energy of neutrinos generated by the sun. "This makes relic neutrinos near impossible to detect directly, at least with anything one could build on Earth," study co-author Fuller said.
Still, the fact that there are so many relic neutrinos means that together they likely exert a significant gravitational pull—"enough to be important for how the universe as a whole behaves," Fuller added. "So by looking at the growth of structures in the universe," Fuller said, "you might be able to detect relic neutrinos indirectly by their gravity."
The
second part of this crash-course in cosmologically relevant physics is
quantum theory. Particles can be "spread out" as a wavefunction - a
representation of possible states - until they're observed and the wave
collapses into a single fact. While that explanation is so
horrifically simplified it would make a quantum scientists eyes bleed,
it's good enough for now. The wavefunction of relic neutrinos from the
big bang is on the length scale of the universe itself. They literally
are sort of everywhere, because the only thing which can "observe" them
is gigantic black holes or galaxies.
It's astonishing stuff, not
just for the cosmo-experts but the casual fan. Because even trying to
wrap your mind around such concepts is like a gym for your brain, and a
booster for your sense of awe.
Posted by Luke McKinney with Casey Kazan.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227115.800-stretched-neutrinos-could-span-the-universe.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=cosmology
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000102000020201303000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes.
http://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/news/archives/archive_detail.php?clip_id=381
It is surprising that scientists consider neutrinos to be the building blocks of matter particles! The inspirations and all available evidence indicates towards heavy neutral quarks to be the building blocks in the primordial matter produced with extremely high density at the time of Big bang. The nature of gravity, the first interaction force field to emerge, could be very different in such circumstances. It may well be highly repulsive in nature then , in order to give rise to the sudden inflation from a point into the original size of the Universe. Such things can be considered as rational prepositions, in the same way as we found the strong nuclear force to be attractive at normal distances for nucleons but has to be highly repulsive at nucleon size distances in order that nucleons do not collapse to a point. Also, the strength of the force fields as we know today, may not be the same at the origin 14 billion years back. These strengths have come down and now show a plateau in their respective strengths. The first field to emerge was gravitational, followed by strong nuclear, then electromagnetic and last was the weak nuclear in order to limit the heavier nuclei around lead. Steadiness of today can not be expected to be true in the early extremely violent period of Universe's birth.
Posted by: Narendra Nathndra Nath | August 16, 2009 at 07:20 PM
Above comment has repetition in my name. May i add that Nature has followed its own logic in evolution. It has not been worked out by our science. Science is only trying to expalin what and how things are happenning as these are in fact. We can not deal with why the things are happening as they are.
Nature guides science and not vice-versa.
Posted by: Narendra Nath | August 17, 2009 at 12:59 AM
I know just how you feel, and that quote about those bored with science and why their heads don't explode is priceless. Actually, I can't understand why those privileged enough to study things like "superposition" for a living manage to keep their feet on the ground. Many of the colleagues do seem to be in a semi-permanent state of bliss. No wonder Professor Einstein couldn't be bothered by doorknobs, and was still, after twenty years at Princeton, stopping undergrads on Campus to direct him to his office or classroom.
It appears to me, after reading this, that the elephant in the conference, namely the inconvenient fact that no one has, as yet, managed to detect a Gravity Wave, despite reaching well past the point when our best estimates said they would be, is finally creeping into the conversation. We're overdue for a revolution that shakes the pillars of orthodoxy. Bell and all the rest planted the seeds with entanglement, proving it now at least as well as the confirmations of Einstein's work.
Wouldn't it be something if soon, some bright, blissful scientist has a moment of clarity and figures out that Gravity, after all is said and done, is just a manifestation of the superpositioning of particles left over from the Big Bang?
The idea is ridiculous, of course. But it's certainly a delight to the imagination.
Posted by: Joel Raupe | August 17, 2009 at 01:08 PM