To be fair, it’s way smaller than this (Picture: Getty) Even if you squint really hard, take a photo and zoom in as much as you can or use a microscope, you won’t be able to see it.
UK-led team of scientists revealed today that they discovered a world so tiny it’s about 100billion times smaller than an atom, the ‘Zeptoverse’.
‘Zepto’ means one sextillionth, or a 10 followed by 21 zeroes.
In other words, seriously small.
Scientists have been trying to find the Zeptoverse for more than 42 years, as exploring it could help us understand why the universe exists.
‘We’ve just reached the borders of the Zeptoverse,’ Dr Harry Cliff, of the University of Cambridge, who led the analysis, tells Metro.
‘And in the future, we hope to zoom down even closer.’ How did we discover the Zeptoverse? This is, in scientific terms, a subatomic kablamo (Picture: Getty Images) For decades, atoms were thought to be the tiniest things in the universe.
Then scientists realised atoms were made of subatomic particles.
Then they realised these were made of even tinier things, too, like quarks.
One type of quark is the ‘beauty quark’, not because it has a good skincare routine, but it’s a more whimsical way of saying its other name, ‘bottom quark’.
What’s lurking beyond beauty quarks fascinates people like Chris Parkes, a University of Manchester physicist involved in the Zeptoverse project.
‘You’d need to do some serious shrinking: as a person is to an atom, an atom is to the Zeptoverse,’ he tells Metro.
To see all this teeny-weeny gobbledygook, Professor Parkes and other British and European experts used a detector deep underground called LHCb, or the Large Hadron Collider beauty.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Up Next Previous Page Next Page It’s part of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which slams particles together in head-on collisions to shatter them and see what’s inside.
And experts don’t have long to spot them; beauty quarks exist for one and a half trillionths of a second before breaking down, called decay.
And even then, they’re hunting for beauty quarks interacting with things at a scale of a billion-trillionth of a metre.
If that wasn’t hard enough, these interactions happen during a rare type of decay that happens in every 10billion beauty quarks.
But the LHCb experiment is powerful enough to see such tiny signals, so the team combed through years’ worth of experiments to find them.
‘In a way, we were “visiting” the Zeptoverse using the LHC like a joint microscope,’....
