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Universal Goo
leapis writes "The NY Times reports that Big Bang Goo may have been found. Scientists at the Bookhaven National Laboratory have 'cracked open protons and neutons like subatomic eggs to create a primordial form of matter that existed when the universe was roughly one-millionth of a second old,' according to recent diagnosic tests."
From the article: "AKLAND, Calif., Jan. 13 -- At least three advanced diagnostic tests suggest that an experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has cracked open protons and neutrons like subatomic eggs to create a primordial form of matter that last existed when the universe was roughly one-millionth of a second old, scientists said here on Tuesday.
The hot, dense substance, called a quark-gluon plasma, has managed to generate intense disputes in the 15 years or so in which scientists have pursued it. In 2000, a major European laboratory claimed that it had, for the first time, liberated particles called quarks from where they are normally trapped in protons and neutrons, a big step on the way to creating the plasma.
Possibly seeking to avoid the outpouring of criticism that followed, Brookhaven scientists at the meeting here recited a series of striking new measurements from their particle accelerator in Upton on Long Island, but refused to say that they had actually produced the plasma.
Creating such a plasma would fulfill some of scientists' biggest dreams, because it would enable them to study the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the colossal explosion that is believed to have been the birth of the entire universe.
"I think the most economical explanation of what we're seeing is a quark-gluon plasma," said Dr. William Zajz, a Columbia University physicist who is the spokesman for an experiment, Phenix. "But we're holding ourselves to rigorous, very scientific standards, precisely to distinguish it from previous claims."
Other scientists here said it was clear that the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider had achieved a milestone.
"The evidence for the quark-gluon plasma is overwhelming," said Miklos Gyulassy, a theorist at Columbia.
Each of the 197 protons and neutrons that make up a gold nucleus has three quarks and a handful of other particles called gluons that transmit the strong force that holds the quarks together. By the strange rules of subatomic physics, swarms of other quarks and gluons flit into and out of existence in each nucleus.
Physicists would like to study the quarks individually, but the force carried by the gluons is something like a rubber band that never loses its elasticity. So a given quark can never escape the embrace of another quark and roam free. The lone exception -- theoretically, at least -- should occur when a collection of ordinary particles becomes so hot and dense that their innards can spill out and form a kind of quark soup, the quark-gluon plasma.
That is the state that the universe is thought to have been in a few millionths of a second after the start of the Big Bang, before the zoo of ordinary particles like protons and neutrons and pions and kaons had coalesced from the primordial soup. A speck of that soup is what the Brookhaven collider seeks to generate, by smashing together gold nuclei at close to the speed of light.
Previous measurements have shown that the lump of material at the center of that collision is from 10 to 100 times as dense as normal nuclear matter. Its temperature is more than a trillion degrees.
The new data, from particle detectors known by their acronyms -- Brahms, Star, Phenix and Phobos -- showed that this searing goo had a remarkable number of properties expected from the plasma.
One finding focused on the almond-shape region, possibly filled with plasma, created when two spherical gold nuclei strike each other, but not quite head on. Theory predicts that fast particles trying to escape the region should become hung up in the gooey plasma and sometimes stopped completely.
That general effect, called jet quenching, had been seen before. But observations by Star have shown for the first time that particles escaping down the long dimension of the almond are more likely to be stopped than those escaping along the short dimension, where there is less plasma to travel through.
"This is demonstrating, if you will, that our unders
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Google News allows you to access NYT's news stories without registration.
Next thing we'll all be swallowed up by a black hole.
ourpla.net is your planet
NYT online articles can be read via Google News
for example, here's what came up by searching "big bang goo"
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
They know pretty precisely how fast the particles are moving, since the accelerator has to know these things to be able to accelerate them. Therefore they can calculate how much kinetic energy they have, which is proportional to the temperature. You can also determine the mass from how much energy it has. They can also probably estimate what the size of the blob of stuff is by setting a max on how far a particle can move in that amount of time. From there, you can deterimine density.