#baryons

One Cosmic Mystery Illuminates Another, As Fast Radio Burst Intercepts A Galactic Halo

“Although scientists have studied [Fast Radio Bursts] intensely since their discovery, their origins remain mysterious. Meanwhile, an estimated 2 trillion galaxies populate our observable Universe. With incredibly large distances for FRBs to traverse, each one risks passing through an intervening galaxy. Giving off multiple pulses of under 40 microseconds apiece, FRB 181112 became the first burst to intercept a galactic halo.”

Where do fast radio bursts come from? Recent studies have demonstrated that they’re associated with host galaxies, but we don’t understand how they work, why some of them repeat, or why the pulse durations are so variable.

What about galactic halos: how much gas is in them? What is the gas temperature, density, magnetization, etc.? These are big questions about galaxies in general that we don’t have a general picture of. If only there were some way to learn more.

A Level Physics - Baryons and Mesons in terms of their Quarks @tutorializer

To reduce the emissions fueling climate change and develop more efficient ways of generating energy, while focusing on the bottom line, governments and private institutions all over the world have been turning to renewable energy. And while solar and wind energy advance and become more widely accepted, scientists continue to explore the possibility of stabilizing nuclear fusion as a truly renewable energy source that far outperforms current options.

But what if there’s an even better source of energy that’s also potentially less volatile than nuclear fusion? This possibility is what researchers from Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago proposed in a new study published in the journal Nature.

For years, physicists have been trying to track down an elusive particle which, although predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, has evaded detection until now. This week, the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has definitively detected the presence of this particle, known as Xi CC ++.

"LARGE HADRON COLLIDER DISCOVERS FIVE NEW SUBATOMIC PARTICLES"

 To date, many impressive findings have been presented in the field of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider has demonstrated yet again that discoveries are not slowing down any time soon.  Using the LHCb detector of the collider, scientists have discovered five new particles, all of them discovered at the same time. These particles are made of baryons, meaning they are made up a three fundamental particles called quarks.  Quarks come in six different 'flavours': up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. The new particles that were discovered are excited states of a particle called Omega-zero, which contains two 'strange' and one 'charm' quark.  "This discovery was made possible thanks to the specialized capabilities of the LHCb detector in the precise recognition of different types of particles and also thanks to the large dataset accumulated during the first and second runs of the Large Hadron Collider," a CERN statement said.  "These two ingredients allowed the five excited states to be identified with an overwhelming level of statistical significance – meaning that the discovery cannot be just a statistical fluke of data."

Missing Matter Found, But Doesn't Dent Dark Matter

“But this doesn't eliminate the need for dark matter; it doesn't touch that undiscovered 27% of matter in the Universe, not in the slightest. It's another piece of that 5% that we know is out there, that we're struggling to put together. It's just protons, neutrons, and electrons, existing in about six times the abundance within these filaments as compared to the cosmic average. The fact that this filamentary structure contains normal matter at all is further evidence for dark matter, since without it there'd be no gravitationally overdense regions to hold the extra normal matter in place. In this case, the WHIM traces the dark matter, further confirming what we know must be out there.”

It’s no secret that if we look at the matter we see in the Universe, the story doesn’t add up. On all scales, from individual galaxies to pairs, groups and clusters of galaxies, all the way up to the large-scale structure of the Universe, the matter we see is insufficient to explain the structures we get. There has to be more matter, both normal (atom-based) matter and dark (non-interacting) matter, to make our theory and predictions match. In a wonderful new pair of papers, two independent teams have detected the warm-hot intergalactic medium along the large-scale structure filaments in the Universe. With six times the normal matter density, this accounts for a significant fraction of the missing normal matter in the Universe! It’s estimated that 50-90% of the baryons in the Universe are part of the WHIM, and this could be the first step towards detecting them. But it doesn’t touch or change the dark matter at all; we still need it and still don’t have it.