Quarks, the smallest building-blocks of matter, never appear alone in nature. They are always tightly bound inside the protons and neutrons. However, neutron stars, weighing as much as the Sun, but being just the size of a city like Frankfurt, possess a core so dense that a transition from neutron matter to quark matter may occur. Physicists refer to this process as a phase transition, a fancy term to describe a holistic change in the overall arrangement of a system’s structure, and in turn, its function.
“J1820 went from a totally unknown black hole to one of the brightest sources in the X-ray sky over a few days.” NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) moved quickly to capture this dramatic transition and continues to follow the fading tail of the eruption.
The Greek god of darkness was Erebus, one of the primordial deities in Greek mythology, born out of Chaos, the primeval void, foreshadowing the contemporary, emerging reality of the dark side of our universe. Enter physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and his Erebon field theory, a novel explanation of dark matter. Despite dedicated searches, no signs of a dark matter particle have turned up.
The Big Bang didn’t just result in our familiar universe, according to a bold new theory presented by physicist Neil Turok and colleagues at the Perimeter Institute- it also created a second “anti-universe” that extended backwards in time, in a mirror image of our own that could explain the existence of dark matter.
“This study may be the “smoking gun” evidence that takes us a step closer to understanding what dark matter is,” says co-author Matthew Walker, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University. “Our finding that it can be heated up and moved around helps to motivate searches for a dark matter particle.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the days’ headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
