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Image source, VICTOR de SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Published1 hour ago
Some physicists have long suspected that mysterious ‘ghost’ particles in the world around us could greatly advance our understanding of the true nature of the Universe.
Now scientists think they’ve found a way to prove whether or not they exist.
Europe’s centre for particle research, Cern, has approved an experiment designed to find evidence for them.
The new instrument will be a thousand times more sensitive to such particles than previous devices.
It will smash particles into a hard surface to detect them instead of against each other like Cern’s main device the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
So what are these ghostly particles and why was a new approach needed to detect them?
The current theory of particle physics is called the Standard Model.
It says that everything in the Universe is made up of a family of 17 particles – well known ones such as the electron and the Higgs boson – as well as the lesser known but wonderfully named charm quark, tau neutrino and gluon.
Some are mixed up in different combinations to make up the larger, but still incredibly small, particles that make up the world around us, as well as the stars and galaxies we see in space, while others are involved in the forces of nature.
But there’s a problem: astronomers have noticed things in the heavens – the
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