Amid the hunt for an answer to one of the most fundamental puzzles in physics, a group of scientists believe the answer lies in a unique object we can’t even detect yet. However, a new study has found that “cosmic strings” are capable of being detected, meaning future scientists have their work cut out for them.
It sounds like something the crew of the USS Enterprise might stumble upon in an episode of “Star Trek,” but a “cosmic string” might be more than just science fiction, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. While we can’t see them now, computer models of the elusive, one-dimensional objects suggest they may actually be detectable.
That’s good, since the researchers believe cosmic strings hold the key to answering an enduring puzzle of the universe: why wasn’t it destroyed in the Big Bang?
“If you just start off with an equal component of matter and antimatter, you would just end up with having nothing,” said lead study author Jeff Dror, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and physics researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, according to Space.com. “Everything would just annihilate.”
The key, according to Dror, is, the mysterious elementary particle called the neutrino, which lacks electrical charge and can be either matter or antimatter. In the moments after the Big Bang unleashed the universe to expand, it began to cool very rapidly, and as it did so, scientists believe it underwent a phase change in the same way that a solid ice cube melts into liquid water. This phase change, Dror believes, caused some neutrinos to flip from being antimatter to being matter, meaning that by the time all the antimatter had collided with matter and mutually annihilated, there was still some matter left over.
Looking to gravitational waves to study the early universe is not novel – scientists have been looking at very big waves caused by supernovae and black holes for some time – but the waves created by cosmic strings are very tiny, so tiny we cannot yet detect them.
That’s where Dror’s research comes into play: according to computer models his team has created, they believe that if these cosmic strings exist, future observatories should be able to detect them.
Looks like physicists had better put on those thinking caps and invent such a device!
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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