Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 23, 2019

Physicists Finally Narrowed Down the Mass of the Tiniest 'Ghost Particle' in the Universe

We're full of neutrinos all the time. They're everywhere, nearly undetectable, flitting through normal matter. We barely know anything about them — not even how heavy they are. But we do know that neutrinos have the potential to alter the shape of the entire universe. And because they have that...

Aug 23, 2019

A Rail Gun the Size of Manhattan Could Reveal the Secrets of the Higgs Boson

Nobody messes with the Large Hadron Collider. It's the supreme particle smasher of the present age, and nothing can touch its energy capabilities or ability to study the frontiers of physics. But all glory is transitory, and nothing lasts forever. Eventually, somewhere around 2035, the lights at this 17-mile-long (27...

Sep 24, 2019

A Strange New Higgs Particle May Have Stolen the Antimatter from Our Universe

Why our universe is swirling with more matter than its bizarre counterpart antimatter — and why we exist at all — is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modern physics. Somehow, when the universe was incredibly young, almost all the antimatter disappeared, leaving just the normal stuff. Theorists have...

Oct 30, 2019

Is a New Particle Changing the Fate of the Universe?

Astronomers around the world are in a bit of a tizzy because they can't seem to agree about how fast the universe is expanding. Ever since our universe emerged from an explosion of a tiny speck of infinite density and gravity, it has been ballooning, and not at a steady...

Dec 9, 2019

Mysterious 'Particle X17' Could Carry a Newfound Fifth Force of Nature, But Most Experts Are Skeptical

Our universe is governed by four fundamental forces. At least that's what physicists have long thought. Now, however, new research suggests that there's a fifth force, a discovery that could upend much of modern physics. On Oct. 23, researchers at the Institute of Nuclear Research in Hungary published a new...

Feb 4, 2020

Oddball sexaquark particles could be immortal, if they exist at all

After decades of poking around in the math behind the glue holding the innards of all matter together, physicists have found a strange hypothetical particle, one that has never appeared in any experiment. Called a sexaquark, the oddball is made up of a funky arrangement of six quarks of various...

May 23, 2020

Strange ice formations may have tricked physicists into seeing mysterious particles that weren't there

What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion? Since March 2016, two mysterious signals from Antarctica have baffled researchers. Twice now, a high-energy particle has seemed to burst straight up out of the ice, tripping detectors on a balloon-borne experiment...

Jun 8, 2020

Why a physicist wants to build a particle collider on the moon

As we probe deeper into the innermost workings of the universe, our particle physics experiments have become ever more complex. In order to reveal the secrets of the tiniest subatomic particles, physicists must make colliders and detectors as cold as possible, remove as much air as possible, and keep them...

Jun 12, 2020

Rare quadruplet 'top quarks' created at world's largest atom smasher

The world's largest atom smasher has given birth to a set of four ultraheavy particles — called top quarks. The formation of these chubby-but-tiny quadruplets, at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, has long been predicted by the Standard Model, the prevailing physics theory that governs subatomic interactions. But...

Aug 6, 2020

Heavy atom spills its guts in decade-long experiment

Wielding proton beams and lasers, physicists have for the first time unlocked one of the key secrets of the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth: astatine. Astatine is a halogen, meaning it shares chemical properties with fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine (all elements that typically bind with metals to form...

Aug 27, 2020

Half the atoms in the planet could be digital data by 2245

Information might seem immaterial. But within a few short centuries, the total amount of digital bits produced annually by humanity could exceed the number of atoms on our planet and, even more unexpectedly, account for half of its mass. Those are the conclusions of a mind-bending new study looking at...

Sep 21, 2020

First experimental evidence of a new type of dark boson possibly found

Two experiments hunting for a whisper of a particle that prevents whole galaxies from flying apart recently published some contradictory results. One came up empty handed, while the other gives us every reason to keep on searching. Dark bosons are dark matter candidates based on force-carrying particles that don't really...

Oct 19, 2020

Researchers capture elusive particle trios at room temperature

Researchers have found a way to trap and study elusive particle trios called trions at room temperature. Previously, trions could be studied only in super-cooled conditions. These trios consist of either two electrons and an electron hole (a space in the electronic structure that an electron could fill, but where...

Oct 20, 2020

Higgs boson possibly caught in act of never-before-seen transformation

Scientists may have observed the Higgs boson doing a new trick: creating pairs of muons. When the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, it was the final piece of Standard Model of particle physics puzzle, a particle that had been— long theorized to exist...

Jan 19, 2021

Mystery particle may explain extreme X-rays shooting from the 'Magnificent 7' stars

More than 400 light-years from Earth, there is a cluster of young neutron stars that are too hot for their age. These stars, known as the Magnificent Seven, emit a stream of ultra-high-energy X-rays that scientists haven't been able to explain. Now, scientists have proposed a possible culprit: axions, theoretical...