This tedious cosmic panorama exists as a result of the universe actually was boring as soon as. Shortly after the Huge Bang, and for a whole bunch of hundreds of years after that, it was relentlessly uninteresting. All that existed was a thick red-hot haze of particles, stretching for trillions upon trillions of kilometers and filling each level within the universe virtually evenly, with minuscule variations within the density of matter between one spot and one other.

However because the universe expanded and cooled, gravity amplified these tiny variations. Slowly, over the next thousands and thousands and billions of years, the locations within the universe with barely extra stuff attracted much more stuff. And that’s the place we got here from—the profusion of issues within the universe as we speak ultimately arose as increasingly materials collected, making these barely over-dense areas into radically difficult locations filled with sufficient matter to kind stars, galaxies, and us. On the very largest scales, boredom nonetheless reigns, because it has for the reason that starting of time. However down right here within the dust, there’s ample selection.

This story nonetheless has some holes. For one factor, it’s not clear the place the matter got here from within the first place. Particle physics calls for that something that creates matter should additionally create an equal quantity of antimatter, rigorously conserving the stability between the 2. Each type of matter particle has an antimatter twin that behaves like matter in practically each means. However when a matter particle comes into contact with its antimatter counterpart, they annihilate one another, disappearing and abandoning nothing however radiation. 

That’s precisely what occurred proper after the Huge Bang. Matter and antimatter annihilated, leaving our universe aglow with radiation—and a small quantity of leftover matter, which had barely exceeded the quantity of antimatter at the beginning. This tiny mismatch made the distinction between the universe we’ve got as we speak and an eternity of tedium, and we don’t know why it occurred. “One way or the other there was this little imbalance and it changed into the whole lot—particularly, us. I actually care about us,” says Lindley Winslow, an experimental particle physicist at MIT. “We’ve got lots of questions in regards to the universe and the way it developed. However it is a fairly fundamental kindergarten form of query of, okay, why are we right here?”

Caught within the act

To reply this query, Winslow and different physicists all over the world have constructed a number of experiments to catch nature within the act of violating the stability between matter and antimatter. They hope to see that violation within the type of neutrinoless double-beta decay, a kind of radioactive decay. In the meanwhile, that course of is theoretical—it could not occur in any respect. But when it does, it could present a potential clarification for the imbalance between matter and antimatter within the early universe.