The Strong Is What's Holding The Universe Together.

Particle physicists might seem like a dry bunch, but they have their fun. Why else would there be such a thing as a "strange quark"? When it comes to the fundamental nuclear forces, though, they don't mess around: the strongest force in nature is known simply as the "strong force," and it's the force that literally holds existence together.

Zoom In On The Elementary Particle.

To find out what the strong force is, you need to have a basic understanding of what physicists call the elementary particles. Let's start with an atom—helium, for example. A helium atom has two electrons zipping around a nucleus made up of two neutrons and two protons. For most high-school chemistry classes, that's where the tiny particles end. But you can zoom even further into the atom: those protons and neutrons are a class of particle called hadrons (à la the Large Hadron Collider!), which are made up of even smaller particles called quarks. Quarks are what's known as an elementary particle, since they can't be split up any further. They're as small as things get. There are two types of elementary particles; the other is the lepton. Quarks and leptons each have six "flavors", and each of those have an antimatter version. (The electrons in our helium atom are a flavor of lepton, so we're as zoomed in on them as is possible.) Heady stuff! Check out the diagram below if you're getting lost.

Forces Of Nature.

Following so far? There are four more parts to this puzzle we call the Standard Model, which is the theory of all theories when it comes to particle physics. Those parts are the fundamental forces. Two are probably familiar: gravity is the force between two particles that have mass, and electromagnetism is the force between two particles that have a charge. The two others are known as nuclear forces, and they're less familiar because they only happen on the atomic scale. Those ones are known as the weak force and the strong force. The weak force operates between electrons and neutrinos (another kind of lepton), but of course, it's the strong force we're here to talk about.

The strong force is what binds quarks together to form hadrons like protons and neutrons. Physicists first conceived of this force's existence to explain why an atom's nucleus can have more than one positively charged proton and still stay together—if you've ever played with magnets, you know that a positive charge will always repel another positive charge. Eventually, they figured out that the strong force not only holds protons together in the nucleus, but it also holds quarks together in the protons themselves. The force actually comes from a type of force-carrier particle called a boson. (Surely you remember the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson?) The particular boson that exerts this powerful force is called a "gluon", since it "glues" the nucleus together (we told you that physicists were a fun bunch).

Here's what makes the strong force so fascinating: unlike an electromagnetic force, which decreases as you pull the two charged particles apart (think of magnets again!), the strong force actually gets stronger the further apart the particles go. It gets so strong that it limits how far two quarks can separate. Once they hit that limit, that's when the magic happens: the huge amount of energy it took for them to separate is converted to mass, following Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. That's right—the strongest force in the universe is strong enough to turn energy into matter, the thing that makes up existence as you know it. We learned some particle physics, everyone. Who needs a snack?

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The SMASH Model May Solve The Biggest Mysteries In Physics.

For decades, physicists have been hard at work trying to answer the universe's unanswered questions. In October 2016, they may have solved five of them in one fell swoop.

To understand what they achieved, it's important to have a basic grasp of particle physics. Everything in the universe is made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles. Those particles are governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how those particles and forces interact is known as the standard model of particle physics, which has so far explained and predicted all phenomena in physics.

Well, almost all. There are still open questions. We know that nearly a third of the universe is made up of dark matter, but we still don't know what dark matter is. We know neutrinos have mass because they oscillate, but we don't know what that mass comes from (heard of the Higgs boson? It's one possible explanation.) We're pretty certain that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe's expansion accelerated—a phenomenon called cosmic inflation—but we don't know what caused it. The Big Bang also should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have canceled each other out. Instead, it enabled the universe's existence by making more matter than antimatter (a process called baryogenesis), and we don't know why. Something called the "strong CP problem" helps explain that question of matter, but brings its own questions to the table.

Physicists say that the SMASH model answers every single one of those questions. Previous models that have provided solutions to a handful of them, such as supersymmetry, have done so by adding hundreds of fundamental particles to the cosmic menu, none of which have ever been witnessed in a particle accelerator. SMASH only adds six: three neutrinos, a fermion, and a field that includes two particles. The team behind the new model believes it could be tested in the next 10 years. Until then, we'll just have to wonder. Explore the world of particle physics in the videos below.

The Centre Of The Milky Way Is Home To A Missive Fountain That Sprew Antimatter.

You wouldn't want to take a trip to the center of the Milky Way. There are a lot of wild and dangerous things there, including a spewing fountain of antimatter. But worry, you're safe to learn about this massive, violent plume of doom from a distance.

An Undetectable Annihilation Fountain.

In 1997, a team of scientists made a bizarre discovery using the CGRO Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE): antimatter billowing out of an invisible spout at the center of our galaxy. This spigot of antimatter creates a plume that rises some 3,500 light-years above the disk of our galaxy. That's a lot of invisible annihilation juice!

To be clear, antimatter is the equal, opposite version of the regular ol' matter that makes up everything around you. The thing about antimatter, though, is that it carries an opposite charge to regular matter and can't be detected in space. Oh, and the fun part: when antimatter comes into contact with matter, the two instantly annihilate each other. This violent crash creates gamma rays, which we are, indeed, able to detect.

Sorry, No Mystery Here.

So, where did all of this antimatter come from? For years, some scientists believed the existence of this antimatter was evidence for famously elusive dark matter. But, alas, our hopes and dreams of observing dark matter were dashed in 2009 (for now, at least).

"There is no great mystery," said Richard Lingenfelter, one of the research scientists who conducted the studies. "The observed distribution of gamma rays is in fact quite consistent with the standard picture."

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The Universe Shouldn't Exist, According to Physics.

At the moment of the Big Bang, the incredibly hot, impossibly dense mass known as the universe exploded to create every particle of matter that now surrounds us. Here's the problem: the way physicists understand it, the processes that formed those first particles should have produced an equal number of antiparticles, thereby annihilating all matter and effectively canceling everything out.

But they didn't. That has left physicists scratching their heads for decades trying to ask this most basic question: why does anything exist at all?

Heads, You win.

Every particle in the Standard Model — the theory that describes the tiniest building blocks of the universe — has what's known as an antiparticle. Antiparticles have the exact same mass as their sister particles, but an opposite electric charge. For example, take a familiar particle like the electron, which has a negative charge. Its antiparticle is called the positron, and it has (you guessed it) a positive charge. Most antiparticles don't get their own names the way the positron does; the others just slap "anti-" in front to become the anti-neutron or the anti-muon. Still others are their own antiparticles: the photon doesn't have a charge, so the photon and the anti-photon are the same thing. Since particles are what make up matter, antiparticles are what make up antimatter.

When antimatter and matter interact, the result is catastrophic. The two particles annihilate each other, leaving behind a burst of pure energy. (In fact, the reaction is so pure and efficient that the writers of "Star Trek" decided to power the starship Enterprise with antimatter). But when a particle of matter is created the way it was at the beginning of the universe, it's always paired with its antimatter particle. Physicists have made this happen in the lab, in fact, and watched as particles and their antiparticles "oscillate" millions of times per second before they decay into another particle, one that's either matter or antimatter. At the beginning of the universe, this decay should have happened in a 50/50 ratio: half into matter, half into antimatter. And as you now know, 50 percent matter plus 50 percent antimatter means zero percent universe.

CERN explains this using a coin analogy: a coin spinning on a table can land on heads or tails, but you can't call it heads or tails until it actually lands. If you spin a whole lot of coins, you should expect that roughly half will land on heads and half will land on tails. Same goes for the oscillating particles. But in the early universe, something changed the odds, and we don't know what that something was. It was as if a magic marble rolled along the table and made most of the coins land on heads.

To Step Forward, To Step Back.

So what was it? Why did we get more matter than antimatter? Why is matter even a thing? To find out, physicists are trying to find the tiniest, subtlest differences between matter and antimatter. If a difference exists, it could explain why one got a leg up on the other in the early universe

In 2016, the Alpha experiment at CERN successfully created and measured antihydrogen, but didn't find any differences between it and regular-matter hydrogen. In early 2017, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider found that baryons — an umbrella term for the type of particles that make up the universe — seem to decay in a slightly different way than their antimatter counterparts. And in fall of 2017, physicists measured the "magnetic moment" of an anti-proton, only to find that it's identical to a regular proton. The search continues, and one of the most fundamental questions in the universe remains unanswered.

If you want to find at least a few answers to the fundamental questions of the universe, you might want to read Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design." 

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