Let’s talk about quarks, shall we?
No, not the guy with the big ears from Star Trek, either — quarks, as in the really, really tiny particles that make up things like electrons, neutrons, and protons. Did you know that? Each of those things are made up of a lot smaller things called, “quarks”. Now you know; go tell your mommy.
Here’s the really Fun Fact™ for today that I wanted to share with you, though, about quarks. If you don’t think anything is amazing in the world, get this one:
Quarks always exist in pairs (at least) — a regular quark and an anti-quark. The “anti” partner is exactly the same as the quark, just an opposite charge, so kind of like how you have yin and yang, right? This partner arrangement is called a, “hadron”. A hadron’s quarks are always stuck together like that couple in high school that moved as single unit and used up the four minutes of passing time between every class to exchange oral flora. A quark pair is held together with a sort of stringy stuff/force called, “gluons”. (The physicist who thought up that one was freaking sharp.) It takes a whole heaping lot of force to even try to pull them apart.
However, if you beef up and try to separate a pair of quarks, which you can only do in experimental arenas like particle accelerators, a funny thing happens. The gluons stretch, forming stringy “tubes” between the quarks, somewhat like a rubber band. If you could actually see it (nobody has), it might look something like this:
But a funny thing happens when you get the quarks too far apart and you push them even further away from each other. Instead of the gluon tube breaking and letting the quarks fly free, the tube splits in the center and a new quark-antiquark pair appears at the ends of the split out of absolutely nothing.
Did you read that? The new pair of particles appears out of thin air. Actually, it’s not even air, it’s a complete vacuum. There’s nothing around them as far as we know, yet these two particles “BOING!” into existence. It might look something like this:
If you are really being destructive, you can keep trying to break them apart and you end up with a generational photo like this next one. It creates what is called a, “hadron jet”, or a shower of particles that were all generated from the original quark/anti-quark pair:
How wild is that? And you thought science wasn’t fun. Shame on you.
You can read up more on quarks, color confinement, hadron jets, gluons, and so forth by going to the Wikipedia article on it here: quark
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