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A Glimpse at Creation's Big Bang

by Tom Jones 

Among the many discoveries of NASA’s twenty-year-old Hubble Space Telescope is the true age of the universe: 13.7 billion years. That’s when a titanic, incomprehensibly violent expansion – the Big Bang -- occurred, marking the start of the space, time, and physical laws which govern the cosmos as we see it in today. The Big Bang is the Genesis chapter in our scientific understanding of the physical reality in which we live, observe, and wonder.

Now scientists have come another step closer to understanding the creation conditions associated with the Big Bang. At the Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York’s Long Island, physicists have cranked up the 2.4-mile-diameter Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to create temperatures of 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than our Sun’s interior. They did it by smashing gold atoms head-on at speeds approaching the speed of light, generating sub-atomic bubbles 40 times hotter than a supernova. Such temperatures have not been seen since the first microseconds following the Big Bang.

“These (collision) temperatures are hot enough to melt protons,” said Brookhaven experimenter Stephen Vigdor, likely forming a “quark-gluon” plasma, a soup of subatomic particles liberated from atomic nuclei.

Within the plasma, the researchers also discovered signs of “symmetry-breaking” behavior, whereby charged particles influenced by the bubbles’ powerful magnetic fields moved in the opposite direction from those expected in today’s universe. Understanding such behavior might explain why today we see much more matter than anti-matter, which should have been created in equal quantities by the Big Bang. Brookhaven theorist Dmitri Kharzeev, said “We all like symmetry, but we really owe our existence to imperfection.”

Probing the Big Bang

An even more powerful particle collider is also probing the origins of our universe and the fundamental structure of the matter comprising everything from atoms to galaxies. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-mile-wide tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border, made headlines when powered up in late 2008. Its ultimate goal is to detect a fundamental particle called the Higgs boson, which in turn gives rise to quarks and gluons, then protons and neutrons, then atoms, molecules, and eventually blue whales and solar systems. An initial breakdown in the superconducting magnets which whirl the beams of protons around the track has finally been repaired, and physicists hope to reach the unprecedented collision energy of 7 trillion electron volts in the first half of 2010.

The LHC is now the most powerful accelerator on Earth, and its debut 18 months ago prompted some wags to raise the possibility of its creating a miniature black hole, which would promptly swallow up the Earth. (If it’s keeping you up nights, check for problems at http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/)

Taking the Search to Space

Particles with energies exceeding those created by the LHC stream continuously through interstellar space. These heavy, high-velocity nuclei are called cosmic rays, created by supernovae and violent stellar processes across the galaxy. On one of the final space shuttle missions late this year, NASA will launch the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station. The AMS is a particle physics detector using the unique environment of space to search for antimatter and dark matter, and measure the hazards posed by cosmic rays.

The 15,000-pound AMS, to be anchored 200 miles up on the space station’s truss, employs a powerful superconducting magnet for increased sensitivity. By looking for anti-helium nuclei streaming across the galaxy, the AMS investigators hope to measure how much antimatter was created by the Big Bang, and help explain why we see so little today. Another AMS investigation searches for “neutralinos,” tell-tale particles that trace the shadowy presence of dark matter; together with the mysterious dark energy, this nearly undetectable dark matter comprises 95% of the mass of the universe. Quarks and cosmic rays, the latter a hazard to astronauts on future deep-space missions, are also targets of the experiment.

AMS, the LHC and the Brookhaven colliders are probing building blocks of matter nearly forty powers of ten smaller than the structure of our visible universe. As insignificant as we are in this vastness, Christ reminds us that God knows each of us intimately: “Even the hairs of your head have all been counted.” (Luke 12:7). As we probe the workings of Creation, don’t forget to marvel equally at those faces and souls, made in His image, that enrich our lives each day.

Tom Jones is a planetary scientist and four-time shuttle astronaut. His latest book is Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System (with Ellen Stofan). See www.AstronautTomJones.com

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)