Even if you squint really hard, take a photo and zoom in as much as you can or use a microscope, you won’t be able to see it.No chance.UK-led team of scientists revealed today that they discovered a world so tiny it’s about 100billion times smaller than an atom, the ‘Zeptoverse’.
‘Zepto’ means one sextillionth, or a 10 followed by 21 zeroes.In other words, seriously small.Scientists have been trying to find the Zeptoverse for more than 42 years, as exploring it could help us understand why the universe exists.
‘We’ve just reached the borders of the Zeptoverse,’ Dr Harry Cliff, of the University of Cambridge, who led the analysis, tells Metro.‘And in the future, we hope to zoom down even closer.’ How did we discover the Zeptoverse? For decades, atoms were thought to be the tiniest things in the universe.Then scientists realised atoms were made of subatomic particles.
Then they realised these were made of even tinier things, too, like quarks.One type of quark is the ‘beauty quark’, not because it has a good skincare routine, but it’s a more whimsical way of saying its other name, ‘bottom quark’.What’s lurking beyond beauty quarks fascinates people like Chris Parkes, a University of Manchester physicist involved in the Zeptoverse project.
‘You’d need to do some serious shrinking: as a person is to an atom, an atom is to the Zeptoverse,’ he tells Metro.To see all this teeny-weeny gobbledygook, Professor Parkes and other British and European experts used a detector deep underground called LHCb, or the Large Hadron Collider beauty.Up Next It’s part of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which slams particles together in head-on collisions to shatter them and see what’s inside.
And experts don’t have long to spot them; beauty quarks exist for one and a half trillionths of a second before breaking down, called decay.And even then, they’re hunting for beauty quarks interacting with things at a scale of a billion-trillionth of a metre.If that wasn’t hard enough, these interactions happen during a rare type of decay that happens in every 10billion beauty quarks.
But the LHCb experiment is powerful enough to see such tiny signals, so the team combed through years’ worth of experiments to find them.‘In a way, we were “visiting” the Zeptoverse using the LHC like a joint microscope,’ Professor Parks says.‘As we are paying a first visit, we don’t yet know what it looks like.’ So why is this a big deal? Our best hunch at why the world is the way it is is called the Standard Model, a rulebook for particles and forces.
Not everything plays by these rules, though, like dark matter, an invisible substance that acts as the cosmic glue holding galaxies together.You’d think we’d know all about it, given it makes up 26% of the universe, yet scientists still haven’t heard even a faint whisper of the shadowy stuff.Dr Michael Wood, a physicist at New York’s Canisius University not involved in the discovery, says it doesn’t reflect light, hence the name.
If you met a person made of dark matter, for example, ‘you would not see them with our eyes since the person would not radiate light’, he says.‘We know that dark matter has mass because it surrounds galaxies and changes how much gravitational effect is observed.‘Galaxies would rotate slower than they do if it was just the shining matter in suns, planets, and interstellar dust.’ Dr Wood is part of a group of scientists who believe quarks are key to making dark matter, as they’re more sensitive to it.
So if undiscovered particles or forces are at play in the Zeptoverse, getting a front-row seat could help see dark matter.Another puzzle it could solve is antimatter.When a blob of matter bumps into its bizarre twin, they annihilate each other, leaving nothing behind.
When the universe erupted into existence, it was equal parts matter and antimatter.But for some reason, you, a being made of matter, are reading this story on your matter-made phone or computer.No one has ever fully explained why we wound up with a matter universe.
The Zeptoverse could also be hiding forces of nature and other ‘stuff we haven’t even imagined’, Dr Cliff says.‘There are very good reasons to think new particles are hiding in the Zeptoverse that would explain some of the biggest mysteries in science.’ The LHCb is being upgraded thanks to a £150million cheque cut by 28 countries to allow scientists to make 10 times more smushed quarks.The UK was going to write a cheque too, until UK Research and Innovation withdrew its share in January.
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