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--------------------- 2547 - BIG BANG - recreated in the laboratory ?
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- During radioactive decay electrons and protons are ejected along with gamma ray radiation. It is the Weak force that was holding those protons and electrons together in the form of neutrons inside the nucleus. It is the Strong force that holds two protons together in the helium nucleus. These ejected particles from the nuclei were first known as “alpha rays“.
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- Radioactive decay is a natural process and it is responsible for much of the molten heat at the center of our planet. Uranium 238 is 99% or all naturally occurring uranium on Earth. It has a half life of 4,510,000,000 years. This happens to be the approximate age of the Earth.
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- Therefore, in Earth’s beginning there was twice as much U-238 as there is today. Uranium 235, a different isotope of uranium containing 3 fewer neutrons, makes up 0.7% of all naturally occurring uranium. It has a half life of 713,000,000 years.
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- By measuring the relative abundance of different radioactive isotopes scientists can date the origin of the sample. Using this technique scientists have estimated the oldest natural rocks found on Earth to by 3,800,000,000 years old.
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- We said natural rocks because we meant not to include meteorites that have come to us from outer space. These rocks have been dated at 4,500,000,000 years. And, we think there are the same age as the Earth.
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- The energy of uranium was put their by an exploding supernova that produced such an enormous shockwave as to compress the outer layers of the star into higher level, or heavier, elements. The star itself uses fusion and can only produce elements up to iron in atomic weight.
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- All elements lighter than iron release energy when fusion occurs. Iron is the first element to absorb energy when fusion occurs. When a star starts the fusion of iron its whole process of existence is reversed. Instead of releasing energy to counteract the pressure of gravity it absorbs energy and for the conservation of energy to be maintained this loss of energy must be made up by the collapse of gravitational energy.
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- This whole process of collapse takes less than one second. The bounce of the collapsing star creates a great shockwave that expands into interstellar space at velocities approaching the speed of light. The gas and particle compression that occurs as this shock wave smashes into the elements is what creates the higher isotopes of uranium (as well as all the other heavier than iron elements).
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- Radioactive decay is the timed release of this shockwave energy. Although the decay process for an individual particle, a neutron, is random the statistical average of the decay in a sample of uranium follows this statistical average, known as the half-life.
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- If we make this same radioactive material ratio measurements on the stars of our Milky Way galaxy, using spectroscopy, we can calculate a lower limit for the age of the Milky Way. It must be older than 8,000,000,000 years, twice as old as Earth and our Solar System. If we assume that supernovae have been exploding at the same rate as we see today we can calculate the upper limit of 13,000,000,000 years.
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- When scientists make calculations for the birth of globular clusters of galaxies they get 15,000,000,000 years ( + or - 3 billion years).
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- The birth of the Universe, the Big Bang, has been interpreted as a super radioactive process. The Universe starting as a single atom with an atomic weight equal to the total mass of the Universe. The Universe we see is the result of repeated fission of this super atom.
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- The diameter of the nucleus of this super atom would have been 30 times the diameter of our Sun. This dimension illustrates how much empty space exists inside every atom if we can condense the whole universe into this size. This is a 1920 theory by Lemaitre, published in 1946.
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- Unfortunately this concept became interpreted too literally. It was seen as an explosion of mass and energy rather than the birth of space and time. All the scientists at that time were trying to use Einstein’s equations for relativity to calculate the Big Bang process and the true age of the Universe. Including Einstein himself.
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- His equations included the cosmological constant that he added to keep the Universe flat and static with the equation results. He later called it his greatest blunder when he learned from Edwin Hubble’s work that the universe was not static but expanding.
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- It was not until the 1960’s that new knowledge was added to our understanding of the Age of the Universe. This was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This radiation is the leftover heat that occurred when the Big Bang first released its radiation. The radiation has cooled to the point that instead of gamma ray radiation at millions of degrees temperature it is microwave radiation at 2.7 degrees Kelvin, -270.3 C.
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- The cosmic radiation may have started out uniform in temperature however as it spread out and interacted with galaxy clusters which contain interstellar gas at 100,000,000 degrees. This interaction boosts the energy of those photons to shorter wavelengths. That is the radiation passing through a galaxy cluster go a bit hotter.
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- Counter intuitive to what we see the radiation gets boosted outside the range of our microwave receiver and it is effectively gone. It appears cooler rather than hotter in our microwave background picture. This apparent change of temperature in our picture is only .01%.
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- The math of how these temperature variations are interpreted is beyond me. It involves computer modeling and much error analysis and many assumptions (inspired guesswork) that is over my head. This interpretation is also compared with several other methods used to date the Universe.
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- As of the year 2000 the age was 13,400,000,000 years (+ or - 1.6 billion years). As of 2005 it is 13,700,000,000 years and waiting for the next new discovery. The time is incomprehensible to our lives. And, the fact that we can comprehend the age of the Universe is truly amazing.
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- Science is trying to recreate these Mini-Big Bangs here on Earth. At Brookhaven National laboratory on Long Island they are using powerful particle accelerators to mimic the conditions of the Big Bang that formed the Universe.
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- Gold nuclei traveling in circles at nearly the speed of light collide head-on. The collision creates a fireball that is exceedingly hot and dense in the concentration of matter and energy. The conditions created are similar to those that existed just microseconds after the Big Bang.
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- The two beams are gold ions, nuclei stripped of their electrons and carrying a positive charge. Each nuclei is a bundle of 197 protons and neutrons. Traveling near light speed they carry the energy of 100 GeV, 100 billion electron volts. When the two nuclei collide head-on they create the energy of 40 trillion electron volts, 40,000 GeV.
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- About 25,000 GeV of this energy is released in the “fireball” of new particles. 10,000 new particles are created in the fireball. The fireball is 5 femtometers across (5*10^-15 meters), has a density 100 times that of an atomic nucleus, and a temperature of 2 trillion degrees.
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- This ultra hot and super dense matter is called a “plasma” of elementary particles, quarks and gluons. Plasma is another form of matter, not a liquid, gas, or solid. It is a soup of free moving ions. Quarks are elementary, sub-atomic particles that make up protons and neutrons.
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- A neutron is one Up Quark and two Down Quarks and is neutral. A proton has two Up Quarks and one Down Quark and has one positive charge. Gluons are the force carriers for the Strong Force that hold quarks together in the nucleus. This soup of elementary particles is 100,000 hotter than the core of the Sun.
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- After 10 microseconds the plasma of Quarks and Gluons cools down enough for the Strong Force to create protons, neutrons, and other Hadrons. Hadrons are any particles that participate in the Strong Force. (Particles participating in the Weak Force are Leptons and include electrons, muons and neutrinos.)
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- There about 120 different Hadrons, examples are protons, neutrons, pions, kaons, rhos, eta-c, lambda, omega, etc. Hadrons that are “particle-like” are Baryons and include protons, neutrons and particles with a spin of ½. Hadrons that are Force Carriers are “Mesons” and include pions, kaons, and rho particles with a spin of 1,2. The transitions of all these particles into what started the Universe is of immense interest to scientists.
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- Regardless of their best efforts and the biggest particle accelerators they can build no one has ever witnessed a solitary Quark particle. They just do not seem to exist by themselves.
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- A big surprise for scientists was that the Quark-Gluon plasma acts more like a hot perfect liquid than like a hot gas that they expected. All the particles seem to have a strong interaction and they move around like a school of fish. It appears as a perfect liquid because it has a very low viscosity and reaches thermal equilibrium very rapidly.
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- In the 1970’s Quantum Chromo Dynamics developed the theory that there were 8 neutral particles called Gluons that were the force carriers between Quarks. These particles carry the Strong Force for all Hadrons.
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- The theory states that the force of the Gluons grows weaker as the Quarks grow closer together. At 10^-15 meters, the diameter of a proton, the Quarks feel a reduced force. If they try to separate greater than this small distance the force becomes stronger, pulling the Quarks back together again.
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- When super hot conditions exist, and the temperatures exceed 10 trillion degrees C, Quarks and Gluons separate and act independently. In order for scientists to create these temperatures they must squeeze the highest possible energies into the smallest possible volume.
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- The collision of heavy nuclei and the resulting fireball produces just such conditions. The fireball is 20,000 GeV and only a trillionth of a centimeter across. More that 10,000 elementary particles explode outward in all directions. The pressure of the explosion exceeds 10^30 atmospheres. The temperature exceeds a trillion degrees.
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- But, after the collision, in a mere 5*10-23 seconds the Quarks, anti-quarks and Gluons all recombine into Hadrons again. Scientists are pouring over the results detected in this first instant. Because the gold nuclei are traveling at 99.99 % the speed of light they are controlled by the theory of relativity that makes their lengths shorter (space shrinks) and their time slows.
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- When the nuclei collide they are flattened into ultra-thin disks of protons and neutrons. When the protons and neutrons collide inside this collision the Quarks and Gluons collide head on. One strange result is a back spray of jets that blast out in the opposite direction of the collusion. The forward jet spray occurs also but it is absorbed by the Quarks and anti-quarks, while the back spray can be observed and studied.
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- This experiment at Brookhaven has been conducted since 2001. The liquid behavior and the jet sprays are two discoveries that are causing a lot of recalculations and new theories. The data taken has to match the theories that define what is expected, or predicted, to happen.
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- Scientists calculate the pressures and energy densities as a function of temperature. An interesting calculation that seems to work uses string theory and quantum gravity theory. It turns out the with strong interacting particles the math in 10-dimension string theory becomes easier to calculate then using 3-dimensions plus time.
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- When Quarks were first predicted in 1964 there were only 3 versions:
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----------------------- Up quark
----------------------- Down quark
----------------------- Strange quark with a mass of 0.15 GeV
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- In 1970 two more Quarks were discovered:
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----------------------- Charm quark with a mass of 1.6 GeV
----------------------- Bottom quark with a mass of 5.0 GeV
- The Quarks produced in the fireball are mostly Up, Down, and Strange species. A few of the Quarks are the heavier Charm and Bottom species. The fireball blows apart and the Quarks-Gluons recombine into Hadrons which are detected along with the photons and other decaying particles. Scientists deduce the physical properties of the Quark-Gluon plasma from the properties of these detected particles.
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- About 1% of the Charm Quarks appear with their anti-particles, the charm antiquark, making a neutral particle called the J/psi. Further measurements around this mysterious particle will help science better understand the heavier Quarks. One technique is to measure temperature from the photon radiation.
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- Astronomers measure the temperature of stars by their color. Color is simply a description of the peak frequency of photon radiation. Our yellow Sun is 5,800 C. So, the same technique might work on the Quark-Gluon fireball.
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- The particle accelerators exceed energy levels of 1,000,000 GeV. The temperatures reached in these collision could exceed, 10,000,000,000,000,000 degrees C. This temperature would simulate the first microsecond of the Big Bang.
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------------------------ 0 seconds ? C Birth of the Universe
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-----.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds
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-----------------------100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 C
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----------------------- Quantum gravity and the era of exotic physics
----- 10^-35 ----- 10^28 C ------ Era of Inflation, Universe expands exponentially
----- 10^-11 ----- 10^15 C ----- Electroweak phase transition. Electromagnetic and Weak Forces become different.
----- 10^-7 ----- 2*10^13 C ----- Quark-Gluon Plasma.
----- 10^-6 ----- 6*10^12 C ----- Quark-Gluon Plasma.
----- 10^-5 ----- 2*10^12 C ----- Quarks bind together into protons and neutrons.
----- 100 sec. ----- 10^9 C ----- Nucleosynthesis, the formation of helium, lithium, beryllium from hydrogen.
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----- 1.2*10^13 -----2,700 C ----- First neutral atoms form. Photons are released 380,000 years after the Big Bang and are today seen as the Cosmic Background Radiation.
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----- 13,700,000,0000 years ----- -270 C ----- Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is first discovered in 1964. The Big Bang occurred a long time ago but we can still see the radiation from that explosion. Scientist today have a new fluid-dynamical cosmology to work with. New discoveries are bound to occur. Stay tuned ……………
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- December 19, 2019. 2547 612 671
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--------------------- Thursday, December 19, 2019 -------------------------
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