The Lost Neutron

Aayushi Vaish
3 min readAug 17, 2020

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.” — Carl Sagan

Artist’s impression of the filaments and halos (in yellow) of dark matter around which formed the large structures of the Universe (galaxy, clusters, etc.)

It is actually quite fascinating to know that about 85% of the mass of our Universe is something which we can’t even see, even with our advanced telescopes and instruments .

Ever-present, omnipotent , Not God but some strange creation of his, way stranger than any of its other “Known” creations. Have you guessed it ? YES! Dark Matter it is.

What if ? Not everything about dark matter is that mysterious? Everything in the universe can be traced back from the beginning, the BIG BANG!. Since then, the universe has cooled down a lot and has got calmer enough for us to exist .

What Happened at the big bang?

There are tonnes of theories , but one thing is quite sure that whatever happened it created a lot of Hydrogen ! all the quarks , leptons and bosons combined together to form electrons, protons and neutrons and forces like gravity to make the universe possible.

But Hydrogen atom as we all know contains 1 Proton and 1 Electron. so what happened to the lone neutron? The nucleus of hydrogen might have gone through a split into Proton-Nucleus and Neutron-Nucleus.

Proton Nucleus obviously paired with the electron to make the Hydrogen atom which further evolved into stars .

Stars, Planets and all the celestial bodies exist due to this separation between proton and neutron which also emitted a lot of energy. It is the property of everything to demand stability and comfort to grow further, that’s exactly how Proton Nucleus started reacting further to form Helium to lithium to carbon and so on and that’s how we were born in less than 5% of Universe.

The Neutron-nucleus is exerting it’s influence, indirectly by keeping us stable by being dark itself , unknowingly keeping the work flow of Universe and also helping in balancing the forces to make comfortable situation for Life cycle. What we can predict about the charge that Neutron-Nucleus is carrying is that it is higher as compared to its counterpart proton-nucleus since it’s influence is up-to 85% as being dark energy .
Dark Energy is the flow of charge that neutron nucleus is carrying after separation, Obviously it’s not stable but is keeping our Universe stable under its ever growing entropy.

Maybe it was a well designed mechanism that Neutron-nucleus charge matches with proton-nucleus charge to keep the forces intact like the generation of Strong Nuclear force and Weak nucleus force.
Weak nuclear force could actually be the interaction between the nucleus that contain the separation content and they still are interacting with each other and producing the weak nuclear force.

The way strong nuclear forces work between proton and neutron in an atom,
is exactly how Weak nuclear force work in space in between separated proton nucleus and neutron nucleus.

The vortex motion which is one of the most significant motions of the universe is actually under the influence of the Dark Matter.
Maybe this motion is carried out by Neutrons-nucleus that is making the Dark matter.

Dark Matter is essential for the stability of the universe as it balances all the forces and also the motions being carried by the matter of the Universe.The dark energy from the Neutrons-nucleus is stabilizing all the coexisting energies.
BIG BANG is the only major event ever happened that led to creation of energy by separating the unstable nucleus (containing both neutron proton charges in it) into two.Maybe Anti matter is the mass which is carried out by that Neutron-nucleus formation just like Matter is formed from proton nucleus atom (we called it as Hydrogen).

Conclusion

Dark Matter , indeed the most mysterious and unknown of what is ever present and undetected. maybe it is the matter for all the other dimensions and that’s why it doesn’t interact with matter of our own or maybe it’s that separated neutron of the hydrogen atom.

Unraveling the truths behind the Dark matter will unravel our thoughts about the universe and how we look at it.

“I’m dark matter. The universe inside of me is full of something, and science can’t even shine a light on it. I feel like I’m mostly made of mysteries.”

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Aayushi Vaish

An Explorer of the Infinite Multiverse . MS - Physics , Northeastern University.