Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter, died at the age of 88 years.

Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter,  died at the age of 88 years, on the December 25, 2016.

First, the existence of this material was proposed by astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky in the 30s, but Rubin is one that confirmed his hypothesis. The observations made by scientists in the 70s were met with skepticism, but were confirmed in the decades that followed.

BBC - Universe - Vera Rubin photo: bbc

Reaching for the Stars - Vera Rubin photo: vq.vassar.edu

First, the existence of this material was proposed by astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky in the 30s, but Rubin is one that confirmed his hypothesis. The observations made by scientists in the 70s were met with skepticism, but were confirmed in the decades that followed.

Dark matter is invisible and impossible to detect because it does not absorb or emit light, so even until this day no one knows exactly what it consists of.

Proof of its existence came when astronomers began to weigh galaxies and noticed that they are much heavier than was originally thought. Vera Rubin worked with a new spectrographs to determine the stars from the edge moves faster than was observed since the first calculations use only the visible matter. It is argued that this difference in speed is due to dark matter.

Rubin's discovery was presented in 1980 in an influential paper that supported the idea that dark matter is an essential mystery that astronomers need to solve.


Other articles on the same theme:

• The First Stars in the Universe could provide clues about Dark Matter

• Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter

• Astronomers issued a shocking theory about the universe: 'The Universe is Flat!'

• The universe: Reading the future from the distant past

Story source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Curiosity . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The First Stars in the Universe could provide clues about Dark Matter

Photo : softpedia.com

The first stars appeared in the Universe which might contain clues to provide more explanations about the origin of dark matter, a substance that still retains its mysteries, 70 years after it was discovered by researchers, informs AFP.

Based on mathematical models created on your computer, researchers at the University of Durham, UK, concluded that dark matter, which is of two types, "hot" and "cold" was essential to the formation of the first stars in the Universe .

Photo:  softpedia.com

Shortly after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago, matter which form when the Universe was smooth as the surface of a river, with a few small undulations. These undulations extended under the effect of gravity which act on dark matter particles contained. Between these particles penetrated gas, and in this process occurred first stars, about 100 million years after the Big Bang, according to the researchers.

British experts say that a large number of stars of different sizes so the vast explosions occurred simultaneously resemble long filaments, which suddenly became incandescent.

Stellar Evolution Photo: physics.stackexchange.com

Liang Gao, one of the co-authors of the study, explained that "these filaments of measurements about 9,000 light years, or a quarter of the length of the Milky Way" galaxy of which the Earth.

Stars born in such dark matter "hot" with a lower density, should still exist in the Milky Way and their analysis should provide clues to unravel the mysteries of dark matter, according to astro-physicists.

Instead, the first stars formed from dark matter particles "cold" were denser and could not survive as much as those formed from matter "hot", according to the mathematical model devised by researchers.

US astronomers announced in May that they had uncovered a ring of dark matter in a galaxy cluster, which is probably the most important so far this mysterious substance that forms over a fifth of the universe.

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• The universe: Reading the future from the distant past
• 4,000 confirmed exoplanets similar to Earth
• Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter
• 10 fascinating planets outside the Solar System
• The newfound alien world named HD 131399Ab

Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter: What The Universe is Made Of

Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter

While dark energy repels, dark matter attracts. And dark matter’s influence shows up even in individual galaxies, while dark energy acts only on the scale of the entire universe

Our universe may contain 100 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, great clouds of gas and dust, and perhaps scads of planets and moons and other little bits of cosmic flotsam. The stars produce an abundance of energy, from radio waves to X-rays, which streak across the universe at the speed of light.

Yet everything that we can see is like the tip of the cosmic iceberg — it accounts for only about four percent of the total mass and energy in the universe.

About one-quarter of the universe consists of dark matter, which releases no detectable energy, but which exerts a gravitational pull on all the visible matter in the universe.

Because of the names, it’s easy to confuse dark matter and dark energy. And while they may be related, their effects are quite different. In brief, dark matter attracts, dark energy repels. While dark matter pulls matter inward, dark energy pushes it outward. Also, while dark energy shows itself only on the largest cosmic scale, dark matter exerts its influence on individual galaxies as well as the universe at large.

In fact, astronomers discovered dark matter while studying the outer regions of our galaxy, the Milky Way.


A ring of possible dark matter highlights this Hubble Space Telescope image of a distant galaxy cluster. [NASA/ESA/M.J. Jee/H. Ford (Johns Hopkins)]

The Milky Way is shaped like a disk that is about 100,000 light-years across. The stars in this disk all orbit the center of the galaxy. The laws of gravity say that the stars that are closest to the center of the galaxy — which is also its center of mass — should move faster than those out on the galaxy’s edge.

Yet when astronomers measured stars all across the galaxy, they found that they all orbit the center of the galaxy at about the same speed. This suggests that something outside the galaxy’s disk is tugging at the stars: dark matter.

Calculations show that a vast "halo" of dark matter surrounds the Milky Way. The halo may be 10 times as massive as the bright disk, so it exerts a strong gravitational pull.

The same effect is seen in many other galaxies. And clusters of galaxies show exactly the same thing — their gravity is far stronger than the combined pull of all their visible stars and gas clouds.

Scientists shed light on mystery of dark matter HeritageDaily

Are dark matter and dark energy related? No one knows. The leading theory says that dark matter consists of a type of subatomic particle that has not yet been detected, although upcoming experiments with the world’s most powerful particle accelerator may reveal its presence. Dark energy may have its own particle, although there is little evidence of one.

Instead, dark matter and dark energy appear to be competing forces in our universe. The only things they seem to have in common is that both were forged in the Big Bang, and both remain mysterious.

Other articles on the same theme:

• New Theory Of Gravity Tries To Explain Dark Matter

• What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

• A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

• Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter, died at the age of 88 years.

Source: hetdex

One step closer in understanding and detecting Dark Matter

Updated 04/05/2020

The view from inside the Large Underground Xenon (LUX)  dark matter detector, which is nearly a mile underground below the Black Hills of South Dakota. The upgraded detector just finished its 20-month run without finding dark matter activity.

Credit: Matthew Kapust. Copyright © South Dakota Science and Technology Authority

The incredibly sensitive LUX dark-matter detector, buried under a mile of rock, has come up empty on its 20-month search for dark matter — further narrowing down the possible characteristics of the strange substance.

Researchers presented the results today (July 21) at the 11th Identification of Dark Matter Conference (IDM2016) in Sheffield, U.K., which gathers together researchers seeking to understand dark matter, the mysterious material that appears to make up more than four-fifths of the universe's mass, but which scientists have not observed directly.

"LUX has delivered the world's best search sensitivity since its first run in 2013," Rick Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University and co-spokesman for LUX, said in a statement. "With this final result from the 2014 to 2016 search, the scientists of the LUX Collaboration have pushed the sensitivity of the instrument to a final performance level that is four times better than the original project goals." [The Search for Dark Matter in Images]

The Davis Cavern in the Sanford Underground Research Facility, which used to be a gold mine, was enlarged and outfitted for the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment. It formerly housed Ray Davis' Nobel Prize-winning solar neutrino experiment.
Credit: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility, © South Dakota Science and Technology Authority

LUX is short for the Large Underground Xenon dark-matter experiment. It rests a mile deep (1.6 km) underground in a former South Dakota gold mine that is now called the Sanford Underground Research Facility. 

Suspended in a 72,000 gallon (272,500 liter) tank of purified water, a 6-foot-tall (1.8 meter) titanium tank holds one-third of a ton (302 kg) of frigid liquid xenon. The xenon's job is to light up, with a jolt of electrical charge and a faint flash of light caught by surrounding sensors, when a dark-matter particle collides with one of its atoms — and the gallons of water and mile of rock's job is to stop anything else from getting in and disturbing it.

This latest result reveals that nothing with the right properties to excite the xenon made it through.

"It would have been marvelous if the improved sensitivity had also delivered a clear dark-matter signal," Gaitskell said. "However, what we have observed is consistent with background alone."

The quest for WIMPs

Even though scientists have never detected dark matter directly, they know it plays an important part in our universe: The way galaxies rotate and the way light bends as it passes by them reveals a substantial amount of extra matter adding to the systems' gravity.

LUX was designed to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) — a leading candidate for dark matter. Those particles are 10 to 100 times the mass of a proton, but interact only very weakly with ordinary matter (which is why scientists cannot easily detect them). Most particles, such as the cosmic rays that constantly stream down onto Earth, would be stopped by the rock and water shielding around the detector, but WIMPs would be able to make it through — sometimes, if researchers are lucky, knocking into one of the densely packed xenon atoms in the detector and releasing a light signal along the way (liquid xenon is transparent to those photons). Other particles that make it in will likely hit multiple xenon atoms and set off a cascade of light, whereas WIMPs would be lucky to hit one.

Researchers examined a huge amount of data collected from the carefully calibrated device over the course of the 20-month experiment, which followed on the heels of a less-sensitive, three-month LUX search that ended in 2013, also with a negative result. Researchers were able to filter out signals in the data created by non-dark-matter particles that managed to get inside the experiment. This gave the researchers the capability to look for interacting dark matter, which would be expected to produce only a few signals per century per kilogram of xenon, researchers said in the statement. [No WIMPS in Space? - NASA Scans For Dark Matter

LUX's lack of detection doesn't mean that dark matter is not made of WIMPs, but it does suggest that dark matter WIMPs cannot have a mass or effect on ordinary matter within a certain range.

"Though a positive signal would have been welcome, nature was not so kind!" Cham Ghag, a physicist at University College London and collaborator on LUX, said in another statement. "Nonetheless, a null result is significant as it changes the landscape of the field by constraining models for what dark matter could be beyond anything that existed previously."

Onward

LUX is one of several efforts to detect dark matter, and its results will help narrow down the searches conducted by future direct-detection experiments, too. Other experiments, like COUPP-60, the XENON Dark Matter Project in Italy, and the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SUPERCDMS) have used similar techniques that heavily shield a material and wait for naturally-occurring dark matter to pass through.

An experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, on the other hand, has a chance of creating dark matter, and then detecting its signal.

"We viewed this as a David and Goliath race between ourselves and the much larger Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva," Gaitskell said. "LUX was racing over the last three years to get first evidence of a dark-matter signal. We will now have to wait and see if the new run this year at the LHC will show evidence of dark-matter particles, or if the discovery occurs in the next generation of larger direct detectors."

LUX's own next-generation detector, LUX-Zeplin, will have 70 times the sensitivity of LUX, researchers said in the statement — which will take LUX's place underground to continue the search.

Other articles on the same theme:

• New Theory Of Gravity Tries To Explain Dark Matter

• What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

• A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

• Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter, died at the age of 88 years.

• Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter: What The Universe is Made Of

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Space.com . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

LARGEST MAP EVER MADE WILL UNLOCK THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE 1.2 MILLION GALAXIES

Updated 02/05/2020

"This is one slice through the map of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Each dot in this picture indicates the position of a galaxy 6 billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side.

Map of the observable universe. (Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia/CC BY 4.0)

Galaxies are highly clustered, revealing superclusters and voids whose presence is seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This image contains 48,741 galaxies, about 3% of the full survey dataset. Grey patches are small regions without survey data."

What you're looking at is a slice of the entire universe, a web of galaxies billions of light years away. You're also looking into the past, since the further into the distance you look, the longer it took that light to reach your eyes. It all seems a lot smaller until you realize that each of those dots is hundreds of thousands of light years across.

A collaboration of hundreds of scientists released the "largest-ever, three-dimensional map of distant galaxies" with over 1.2 million spots as a part of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program using a telescope in New Mexico, according to a press release from Brookhaven National Lab. The map isn't for wanderers; scientists are trying to understand some of the universe's unexplained properties, like what dark matter and dark energy are. Understanding those things requires a three-dimensional map bigger and looking further out than any map scientists have made prior.

"The problem was, if you take data on the brightest galaxies in the sky, they happen to be nearby galaxies," BOSS' principal investigator David Schlegel from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab told Popular Science.

"For a cosmologist, that’s just a map of the backyard. I don’t want a map of the backyard. I want a map of the universe."

Up until fifty or so years ago, scientists more or less understood the universe, said Schlegel. But the discovery of dark matter and dark energy showed we don't really understand most of it, since they make up around 95 percent of the stuff in the universe. Yeah, we don't understand 95 percent of the stuff in the universe.

That's not to say we can't measure or detect dark matter and dark energy, though. If you look at the map, you'll see a web of galaxies and places where dots clump. Dark matter still feels gravity's pull, so galaxies align themselves along the webs and clumps of dark matter. We can detect dark energy too. When we look into space, really distant things we'd expect to look white actually look red; they've been redshifted. That's because their light rays have stretched out, because the space itself the light travels through expands, like a stretched-out tattoo on someone who's gaining a lot of weight.

By measuring really far away things, we found out that the universe wasn't just expanding, but the rate it expanded was actually speeding up. That discovery won a team of scientists the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"I don’t want a map of the backyard. I want a map of the universe."

Map of large universe (Hélène Courtois, Daniel Pomarède, R. Brent Tully, Yehuda Hoffman, and Denis Courtois) smithsonianmag

In one theory of the universe, there's a single number called the "cosmological constant" that says dark energy is a uniform thing permeating the universe and making it expand. Some physicists were hoping that a larger map would show the cosmological constant's value changing in different places, rather than just being a single number everywhere, but the single number stuck throughout the swath of the universe covered by BOSS' results. Schlegel thought theoretical physicists might be a little pigeonholed by the results, since they can do more with varying numbers than a single constant.

Mark Wise, theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology, hadn't reviewed the BOSS results yet but agreed with Schlegel. "It would be more exciting if it was something else," he told Popular Science.

Map of Universe

The BOSS experiment is about more than just dark energy, though, pointed out Anže Slosar, Brookhaven National Lab and BOSS cosmologist who leads his "futile existence as a scientist and a bureaucrat" (much as a cosmologist would), according to his website. The experiment will also help pinpoint the mass of the neutrino particle. Soon, other experiments like the larger Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on a telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona will pick up where the BOSS experiment leaves off. But Slosar was most excited about how intertwined our physical experiences on Earth are with the rest of the universe.

"The fact that it’s the same fundamental laws that guide GPS satellites all the way down to one second after the big bang is pretty mindblowing," he said.

Other articles on the same theme:

• What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

• A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

• The First Stars in the Universe could provide clues about Dark Matter

• NOBEL PHYSICS 2016. Nobel Prize winners are David DJ. Thouless, F. M. Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz

The above post is provided by POPULAR SCIENCE.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Researchers at the LHC are ready to reveal the secrets of the universe. '' We could write a new chapter in the history of creation '

Researchers at the European physics center of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) are preparing to reveal the largest collection of information about the particle accelerator (LHC), three years after they confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson.

Higgs boson discovery has provided researchers win Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Disclosure answered the question about how matter acquires mass elementary, but did not solve the puzzle elements missing from the standard model of physics.

The standard model includes a number of equations that summarize everything known, currently, about nature, but some questions remained unanswered. One of the questions concern the gravity that seems not within the standard model. Another conundrum is that there is a much greater amounts of matter in the universe than the 4% we use. Propelled billion protons inside the circle, circumference of 27km, are facing each other at a speed of 13 electronvolts, 13 times faster than the strength of a mosquito.

The intensity of protons collide with each other reached a new record, providing a huge number of information. Researchers at CERN counts its massive volume of information ,, femtobarni ''.

Sea discovery will be presented at the Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago next month.

The first indication of a possible outcome was presented in May when CMS and Atlas have suggested that there is a mistake in the data of 750 gigavolţi. In the next two weeks researchers have filed more than 89 papers in trying to find the answer. There are 450 works

Tiziano Comporesi said: ,, What we have seen can be likened to throwing a coin six times normal air that will always fall on your head '.

,, I think dark matter will be investigated much harder, is more rare than the Higgs boson, '' said Camporesi.

The first sign of a much heavier particles than the boson was discovered at aceleratorul particles in May. The discovery can not be explained by current models, but its existence could lead to the discovery of a new set of particles and likely existence of a new fundamental forces.

According to data produced in May at the particle accelerator in Geneva, we have discovered a new type of particle six times heavier than the Higgs boson.

By other measurements, if it proves true, the discovery could be huge.

By mid-July ,, we should have enough information to confirm or refute the existence of particles, '' said Professor James Olsen, corordonator and physicist at Princeton.

According to Dr. Michele Redi, a researcher at INFN Florence, revealed that the existence of particle can be confirmed in a few days or weeks ,, ''.

,, If the error is real, we could write a new chapter in the history of fundamental physics, '' said Dr. Redi

Measurement of protons is the best method for the detection of new laws of physics, because the protons are easily detected and physicists know what to aştepte.Când particles in proton decay, they release energy proportional to their mass. This error is similar to that which gave us the first indications for Boston Higgs discovery. This new particle, if any, could lead to the discovery of a new set of particles.








Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Source: Descopera

The universe: Reading the future from the distant past

Cosmic Calendar - Wikipedia

Scientists work at SLAC and Stanford are combining experimental data and theory to understand how the universe formed and what its future holds. Here, clumps and filaments of dark matter (black areas) serve as the scaffolding for the formation of cosmic structures made of regular matter (bright areas), including stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters.

The Dark Energy Survey World Scientific

These are the fundamental questions "astrophysical archeologists" like Risa Wechsler want to answer. At the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) of Stanford and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, her team combines experimental data with theory in computer simulations that dig deeply into cosmic history and trace back how matter particles clumped together to form larger and larger structures in the expanding universe.

"Most of our calculations are done at KIPAC, and computing is a crucial aspect of the collaboration between SLAC and Stanford," says Wechsler, who is an associate professor of physics and of particle physics and astrophysics.

Wechsler's simulated journeys through spacetime use a variety of experimental data, including observations by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which recently discovered a new set of ultra-faint companion galaxies of our Milky Way that are rich in what is known as dark matter. The gravitational pull from this invisible form of matter affects regular matter, which plays a crucial role in the formation and growth of galaxies.

Dark energy is another key ingredient shaping the universe: It inflates the universe like a balloon at an ever-increasing rate, but researchers don't know much about what causes the acceleration.


Two future projects will give Wechsler and other researchers new clues about the mysterious energy. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), whose science collaboration she is leading, will begin in 2018 to turn two-dimensional images of surveys like DES into a three-dimensional map of the universe. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), whose ultrasensitive 3,200-megapixel digital eye is being assembled at SLAC, will start a few years later to explore space more deeply than any telescope before.

"Looking at faraway galaxies means looking into the past and allows us to measure how the growth and distribution of galaxies were affected by dark energy at different points in time," Wechsler says. "Over the past 10 years, we've made a lot of progress in refining our cosmological model, which describes many of the properties of today's universe very well. Yet, if future data caused this model to break down, it would completely change our view of the universe."

The current model suggests that the universe is fated to expand forever, turning into a darker and darker cosmos faster and faster, with galaxies growing farther and farther apart. But is this acceleration a constant or changing property of spacetime? Or could it possibly be a breakdown of our theory of gravity on the largest scales? More data will help researchers find an answer to these fundamental questions.

Other articles on the same theme:

What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

The First Stars in the Universe could provide clues about Dark Matter

NOBEL PHYSICS 2016. Nobel Prize winners are David DJ. Thouless, F. M. Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The original item was written by Manuel Gnida. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

Although most of the nuclei of atoms are spherical, there are "figures" most non-conformist - for example pear-shaped. The discovery could have important implications in clarifying some of the mysteries of physics and the cosmos.

It is suspected for some time that nucleus such forms may exist, but now, an international team of physicists has succeeded in demonstrating that.

The discovery could fuel efforts discovery of a new fundamental forces in nature, which could explain why the Big Bang gave birth matter and antimatter in proproţii uneven - more matter than antimatter. This imbalance plays a major role in the history of the universe.

Big Bang Confirmed Again, This Time By The Universe's First photo: Atoms Forbes

As explained by one of the researchers involved, Tim Chupp, University of Michigan, where the Big Bang when matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts they would have annihilated each other and nothing would have been - no stars, no planets, no life.

Timothy Chupp College of Literature, Science, and the Arts University of Michigan

Particles of antimatter have the same mass but opposite electrical charge to the particles of matter. Antimatter is rare in the universe, appearing only for fractions of a second solar flares and cosmic radiation in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

When particles of matter antimatter particles meet, they annihilate each other.

What causes this imbalance between matter and antimatter is one of the great mysteries of physics. The phenomenon is not predicted by the Standard Model - the theory that describes the complex nature of matter and the laws that govern it.

Large Hadron Collider restarts after two years photo: University of Cambridge

The Standard Model describes four fundamental forces (or interactions) governing the matter to behavior: gravity, electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.
Physicists are currently looking for a new force or interaction to explain the imbalance between matter and antimatter.

Evidence of such interactions could be obtained from measurements of the axis nuclei of radioactive elements such as radium and radon.

Researchers have confirmed that the nuclei of these atoms are pear-shaped nuclei unlike most "typical" spherical or oval.

The nucleus is the very dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom. It was discovered in 1911, as a result of Ernest Rutherford's interpretation of the famous 1909 Rutherford experiment performed by cr and Ernest Marsden, under the direction of Rutherford.

 The proton–neutron model of nucleus was proposed by Dmitry Ivanenko in 1932.Almost all of the mass of an atom is located in the nucleus, with a very small contribution from the orbiting electrons. The diameter of the nucleus is in the range of 1.75(1.75×10−15 m) for hydrogen (the diameter of a single proton)to about 15 fm for the heaviest atoms, such as uranium. 

These dimensions are much smaller than the diameter of the atom itself (nucleus + electron cloud), by a factor of about 23,000 (uranium) to about 145,000 (hydrogen).The branch of physics concerned with studying and understanding the atomic nucleus, including its composition and the forces which bind it together, is called nuclear physics.

Pears make a new type of interaction effect is stronger and easier to detect.

"Pears is something special," said Chupp. "It means that the neutrons and protons, making up the core are placed in different locations along an internal axis."

Positively charged protons are pushed away from the center of the nucleus by nuclear forces, fundamentally different from spherical symmetry forces, such as gravity.

"The new type of interaction, the effects of which we are studying, do two things, says Chupp. "Produce matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe only format and align the spin axis direction in these pear-shaped nuclei (spin is an intrinsic physical property of particles in the same category as mass or electric charge, is defined as the angular momentum or the moment intrinsic angular particle).

To determine the shape of nucleus, they produced beams of atoms of radium and radon with very short lifetime, which were accelerated, bombing other atoms, nickel, cadmium and tin.

Following this process, the nuclei were emitted gamma rays that were dispersed after a certain pattern, thus revealing pear-shaped nuclei.

"Our findings contradict some theories of the nucleus and other nuances," says Professor Peter Butler, a physicist at the University of Liverpool and leader of the study.

Peter Butler photo: University of Liverpool

Measurements made will also help on scientists studying electric dipole moment (EDM) at the atomic level, research into the discovery of new techniques to exploit the special properties of isotopes of radium and radon.

These research results, along with those of nuclear physics experiments will help test the Standard Model, the best theory that physicists currently have to understand the nature of the elements which constitute the universe.

Other articles on the same theme:

• New Theory Of Gravity Tries To Explain Dark Matter

• Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter, died at the age of 88 years.

• Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter

• 4,000 confirmed exoplanets similar to Earth