{"id":16126,"date":"2025-06-15T08:50:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T12:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=16126"},"modified":"2025-06-15T08:50:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T12:50:10","slug":"100-year-old-universe-mystery-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/100-year-old-universe-mystery-solved\/16126\/","title":{"rendered":"100-year-old universe mystery solved \u2014 It could change the laws of the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Scientists have been asking themselves the same question for 100 years: <\/span><b>how long does a free neutron live<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> before it decays? It seems that the answer to this mystery has finally arrived, but what seemed like a simple answer may have exposed a deep flaw in the way we understand the fundamental particles of the universe. And, well, this discovery could change all the laws of the universe, or at least, how we thought of them until now.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>How did this mystery begin?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It all started in 1932, shortly after scientists discovered the neutron itself. Since then, they have been trying, at all costs, to measure how long a neutron, when not bound to an atomic nucleus, takes to decay. They called this measurement the neutron lifetime, and it is essential not only for nuclear physics but also for understanding<\/span> how the first chemical elements were formed<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in the first minutes after the Big Bang, that is, for understanding our universe as a whole. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From this, two experimental approaches were established as standard: the beam and bottle methods.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>Beam: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Neutron beams are directed, and the protons resulting from the decay are counted.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>Bottle:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Ultracold neutrons are stored in containers, and those that survive after a certain time are counted.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The big problem is that these two techniques provide different results, which has triggered one of the biggest puzzles in modern physics: the<\/span><b> enigma of the neutron&#8217;s lifetime.<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> In the beam method, the average measured is 888 seconds, while in the bottle method, the number drops to 878 seconds. Even though a difference of 10 seconds may seem like a small thing, in the context of particle physics, it is huge. 100 years later, physicist Eugene Oks came up with a new explanation.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What does hydrogen have to do with dark matter?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Oks, in a small percentage of cases, the neutron does not disintegrate into three particles (proton, electron, and antineutrino), as we thought until now, but rather into just two: <\/span>a <b>neutrino and an exotic type of hydrogen atom <\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/pink-hydrogen-japan-america\/3275\/\">(different from the green hydrogen found in America).<\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0He says this atom would be invisible, since it does not interact with light, and therefore completely escapes conventional detectors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The physicist has even given this particle a name: <\/span>\u201csecond flavor\u201d of hydrogen<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. In this case, the electron would be very close to the proton, so close that the atom would not have an electric dipole moment, which would make it incapable of emitting or absorbing light. In less technical terms, this would be a dark atom, undetectable by instruments based on electromagnetic radiation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This hypothesis by Oks ends up explaining why the beam method records a longer lifetime:<\/span><b> it fails to account for these \u201cinvisible disintegrations\u201d<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Therefore, when recalculating the frequency of this type of decay using a modified solution of the Dirac equation, Oks concluded that it can occur in up to 1% of cases: enough to resolve the 10-second difference.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>What impact does this discovery have on the laws of the universe?<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even though invisible hydrogen atoms don\u2019t interact with light, they still exert gravitational force, fitting the profile of the mysterious dark matter perfectly. What Oks suggests is that this second flavor of hydrogen may be the <\/span><b>main form of baryonic dark matter:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the kind made up of familiar particles, such as protons and electrons, but arranged in unconventional ways.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And what does this mean for the current laws of the universe? Well, this whole explanation could solve one of the most enduring enigmas of modern physics and, in the process, offer an elegant explanation for dark matter, without having to resort to hypothetical particles. Perhaps we can finally understand the 85% of the universe that we\u2019ve never seen, since it\u2019s made of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/85-of-universe-never-saw-dark-matter\/10277\/\">strange and indecipherable dark matter<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>To learn more about this discovery, you can check the full study here: Oks, Eugene. (2025). <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0550321325000884\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Resolution of the neutron lifetime puzzle and the conceptual design of its experimental confirmation<\/em><\/a>. Nuclear Physics, B(1014), 116879.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have been asking themselves the same question for 100 years: how long does a free neutron live before it &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"100-year-old universe mystery solved \u2014 It could change the laws of the universe\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/100-year-old-universe-mystery-solved\/16126\/#more-16126\" aria-label=\"Read more about 100-year-old universe mystery solved \u2014 It could change the laws of the universe\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":16127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}