Predicted by physicists as a “strange” form of matter that
might be created in high energy particle experiments and freak cosmic events,
could strangelet particles be the death knell of the entire known
Universe?
By: Ringo Bones
Forget the super powerful mini black holes that could have
been created on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that would have supposedly
migrated into the core of planet Earth causing it to implode in a matter of
minutes. As far back as 1999, doomsday prophets have been warning us that
strangelet particles would be the death knell of the entire known Universe. But
what are strangelet particles anyway?
Stangelet particles / strangelets or strange matter had been
theorized by high energy physicists since the dramatic advances of particle
accelerator technology – i.e. very high energy yields – since the start of the
1970s. Some researchers believe that ion smashups in a powerful enough particle
accelerator could create a new form of matter called strangelets. These
subatomic bundles could theoretically created when three species of quarks
combine: the common “up” and “down” quarks that are the building blocks of
protons and neutrons and the rarer “strange” quarks that are found in
short-lived particles such as Kaons.
So far at the time of writing this blog, scientists have yet
to observe an actual strangelet in nature, so they can only guess at its
properties. The most dangerous possibility would be the creation of a stable or
long-lived strangelet with a negative charge. This type of strangelet would not
act like ordinary negatively charged particle; it would grow rapidly by
gobbling up all positively charged atomic nuclei that it encountered. Such a
voracious beast known as “strange matter” could consume our planet as
effectively as a black hole could. But should we be worried about “strange
matter” rampaging across our Universe?
According to Robert L. Jaffe, a theoretical physicist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that strangelets can only be
produced under conditions of extremely high pressure and extremely low
temperature. Jaffe says: “It is effectively impossible to make them in the ion
collider we currently have.” And he also said that “The only place where it
could happen is in a core of a neutron star.”Fortunately, cores of typical
neutron stars are never just a few thousandths of a degree Kelvin above
absolute zero.