Googol-sized Particles Larger Than Thousands of Galaxies Fill the Universe -New Discovery

Originally posted by Gorman91
Oh indeed. Another frightening thing is that it opens the possibility that if you stretched a wave so far out, COULD you destroy it? could you alter the law of conservation of mass and energy? That is scary.

as i said earlier, the CMB used to be a million degree hot flash of light and now we can only hear the faint echo in the radio band (in fact the static on a TV screen or radio is that CMB echo!) that is caused by space itself expanding while the wave continued traveling at light speed. nothing is destroyed and the law of conservation of mass and energy is not impacted at all.

the "particles" postulated in that article are probably just waves too and if the theory is true there should be a detector that can find those echos. the way the CMB is all over the universe so would be these "particles" (or their echos anyway)

To Help You Understand

Originally posted by Uniceft17
I really wish I could understand what this is all about, could someone explain this to me in simple way, is it possible? Yes, I am oviously ignorant on this subject. :/

Sorry this has been so long coming.

There have been some amazing ideas tossed about in this thread. Without in any way trying to poop the party, I'd like to contribute a few words that may help you understand the subject better. This, in turn, will help you evaluate some of the ideas being discussed.

I'll keep it short. Here's a good place to start:

Originally posted by jkrog08
This is going to throw some major kinks into our current understandings of quantum and macro realms.

I don't think so. The idea of 'stretched' neutrinos fits in well with the current worldview of physicists and cosmologists.


Hot, Fast and Nasty

To understand this, let's go back to those moments just after the Singularity began expanding, the moments, if you like, in which the infant universe first drew breath. Nearly all the matter in existence has just reacted with all the antimatter in the mother of all explosions. A bit of matter is left over - all the matter there will ever be in the universe from now on.

The universe is still tiny: You can imagine it the size of a grapefruit, the size of a beach ball or the size of a planet. It's expanding so fast that all these comparisons are well in the ballpark.

Incredible, unimaginable energies are flying around inside this small space. Matter as we know it cannot exist - it would be ripped apart before it could form. Never mind atoms and molecules; even protons and neutrons can't exist yet. What can and does exist are the so-called fundamental particles: photons, neutrinos*, electrons and quarks.

But this grapefruit-beachball-planet-sized universe is, at this time, expanding faster than light - at least, faster than light travels through the universe today. And as it expands, its contents are expanding with it.


Stretching Out

The expansion is accompanied, as you would expect, by cooling. And as the universe cools, quarks combine to form protons and neutrons, and these combine with electrons to form atoms. Atoms clump together under the influence of gravity. The local expansion of space is halted, though on a cosmic scale, space continues to expand. Solid, clumpy matter, once formed, doesn't expand and neither does the space around it.

The photons, meanwhile, are 'expanding' away along with space itself. But light always travels through space at the same speed. It can't speed up or slow down. Instead, it loses energy by redshifting, its frequency falling as the space it is crossing expands. You can think of a redshifted photon as a stretched photon. The photons we're looking at, the ones that were around at the birth of the universe, are still around - but they've been redshifted down from gamma frequencies to longwave radio frequencies. That's how far they've been stretched.

A Long Story

So far, this is all pretty straightforward stuff. Now let's think about neutrinos.

Neutrinos have barely any mass. They are created by beta decay, but once created they barely interact with other particles. Gravity scarcely affects them; electromagnetic energy has no effect on them and neither do the strong or weak forces**. They go their own merry way, unaffected by anything the universe can throw at them.

With one exception: the expansion of space itself.

Very simply, the space through which those primordial neutrinos travel has been stretching ever since creation, and the neutrinos - without any physical property that would oppose this expansion*** - have just kept stretching along with it. As a result, they're now stretched across the universe.

So that's what we're talking about here. It has nothing to do with strings, branes or quantum entanglement. It's a whole lot simpler than that. Needn't stop us speculating, though.

* * *

Well, there you have it: my two cents' worth. I hope it makes sense and helps inform your speculations. But neutrons are ghost particles as far as beings like us, beings made of matter, are concerned. We have our work cut out just detecting them, so I doubt we'll be using them as an intergalactic telegraph any time soon. It'll be a while before the world's patent authorities are troubled by applications from would-be-inventors of the ansible.

Scamandrius out. As usual, I shall genuinely welcome correction or discussion on this stuff from anyone who knows better than I.


*Yes, masqua, neutrinos do come from the sun, but it is not and never was the only source.

**As far as I know.

***Such as an invariant velocity or the ability to halt local metric expansion.

reply to post by Astyanax


Yea the article in the OP was misleading a little bit a first (imo), another article cleared it up. It is simply the wave function that has expanded. I was originally thinking that they were talking about the actual particle itself, not its wave function. Good work in explaining the Big Bang by the way!

reply to post by Astyanax


Maybe I am not fully understanding this but it seems quite obvious to me that one would expect a wave function to be this large considering the particle formed 13.7 billion years ago. The only issue I would see preventing this would be the collapse of the wave or the extreme stretch of the wave to such a degree it was indiscernible and pretty much part of the vacuum again and not related to the source particle anymore.

reply to post by Fromabove


Yes but it's mass with energy. I don't think it's known how to directly create mass from energy, but we do create larger mass from smaller mass using energy. The fact is that energy is light and other waves, mass in a probability wave super condensed into one area. You ARE a wave, just so small that you can see yourself at one place. However we do not stretch with the universe because our quantum location is specific. If we were small then we would spread out as a wave, but we do not. We would remain our current wave function unto infinity, or until we alter our own wave to spread it out, hence star trek teleporters. Stretch the wave out, then increase gravity at a different location, and the wave collapses to there, quantum tunneling you.

The last biggest thing in space was the super belt of super galaxies
that sort of dissolved the uniform expansion from the big bang.

Thus the tapestry of space became invoked.


[edit on 6/16/2009 by TeslaandLyne]