InvisiblesPlus PI at CSIC Olga Mena gave an outreach talk titled 'Invisibles in the Cosmos' in Valencia on 21st May
At the Pint of Science festival, researchers do pop-up science talks in bars around the country. Last tuesday, Olga Mena (IFIC-CSIC) participated in Valencia with her talk 'Invisibles in the Cosmos... and in Science'.
What is the universe made of? This question has puzzled humanity since Ancient Greece. One of the fundamental building blocks of nature are quarks, which are bound inside protons and neutrons, making a large part of our known universe. For a long time quarks have been seen only when combined in triplets or in pairs. Recent observations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN suggest that there exist also particles made of four and five quarks. The true identity of these new particles, however, remains a mystery: Are they made of quarks tightly bound together? Or, are we seeing a sort of subatomic molecule? Physicists at the LHC are working to answer these questions.
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“If I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.”