Physicists believe that an unknown force could be acting on sub-atomic particles known as muons.
  • Skyler@kbin.social
    424·
    1 year ago

    Have you all not seen Interstellar? Obviously the fifth force of nature is love.

  • palordrolap@kbin.social
    20·
    1 year ago

    What are the odds that muons are more sensitive to neutrino interaction and this is what the scientists are seeing? Muons are pretty massive, after all, and neutrinos are literally everywhere. Obligatory: “billions of neutrinos pass through you every second”.

    Muons are leptons like neutrinos and their electron cousins, and we already know that electrons can be boosted by the occasional neutrino interaction. A free muon in a magnetic field has nowhere to be boosted to, so, coupled with a hypothetically higher chance of interacting with a neutrino, I’d expect something to happen when it does, though not exactly what.

    I figure we don’t already use muons in neutrino detectors because they don’t last very long (about a second) before decaying, and the only way to get them to last longer is to accelerate them to a decent fraction of the speed of light. That way, from our reference frame they can last minutes or more. That’s going to be energy-hungry compared to the passive detectors we have.

    i.e. the passive detectors which take advantage of the aforementioned electron / atom interaction.

  • Ashyr@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Interesting. I never expected a fifth. If anything, I’ve seen a push for reducing the number down to three (gravity, strong and electro-weak) or possibly just two.

  • Lenguador@kbin.social
    61·
    1 year ago

    From Wikipedia: this is only a 1-sigma result compared to theory using lattice calculations. It would have been 5.1-sigma if the calculation method had not been improved.
    Many calculations in the standard model are mathematically intractable with current methods, so improving approximate solutions is not trivial and not surprising that we’ve found improvements.

    • slackassassin@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 year ago

      So what? I mean, not to be shitty, but this is important work that allows for this downplayed and pedantic take to even exist.

      Experimental verifications should be celebrated, and the fact that they’re not is the problem with the current state of science journalism.

  • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
    31·
    1 year ago

    Tangentially related but I can’t seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:

    1. Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
    2. If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
    3. Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.
    • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
      371·
      1 year ago
      1. Strong nuclear force: holds the nucleus of an atom together
      2. Weak nuclear force: responsible for radioactive decay
      3. Electromagnetic force: of charged particles
      4. Gravitational force: attractive force between objects with mass
      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        72·
        1 year ago

        Not all decays are weak-based, though, and not all weak phenomina are directly related to radioactivity. That’s just the only thing a layman has heard of where it’s relevant.

        The strong force only holds atoms together through a sort of trickle-down force, too, but that one feels like splitting hairs.

        • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
          191·
          1 year ago

          The person I replied to wasn’t able to name the forces beyond gravity, so I think over-simplification and reduction to specific phenomena they would have heard of is appropriate.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
            52·
            1 year ago

            Oh, absolutely. I was adding on for anyone else reading who might appreciate answer gravy. Sorry if it came across as critical of what you wrote, my bad.

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        4·
        1 year ago

        Well, the article currently lists them as: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.

        If you’re not familiar, you wouldn’t be able to guess that the last two are nuclear forces and in the context of a new force, that list is rather confusing.