HOW lengthy is a chunk of string? On this case, so long as the whole universe is large. However then cosmic strings aren’t your common twine. Thinner than a proton and stretching for billions of sunshine years, they might propagate by way of house at nigh-on the velocity of sunshine, fuelled by – and containing – the hardly conceivable energies that existed on the large bang, the place they originated.
Or no less than that’s the concept. Cosmic strings are among the many most excessive phenomena theorists have ever dreamed up, and but there are sound causes to contemplate them. They’re “probably the most believable, testable predictions of unified theories”, says Neil Turok, a physicist on the College of Edinburgh, UK – referring to theories that search to explain how the elemental forces of nature had been merged, after which diverged, within the very early universe.
We’re but to search out any clear proof for the existence of cosmic strings. However prior to now yr, astronomers have noticed a slew of anomalies – from inexplicably giant galaxies to unusually formed clusters – that recommend we might lastly be inside touching distance of those enigmatic threads. What’s extra, if one in every of these hints does maintain up, we now have the instruments to verify the existence of cosmic strings as soon as and for all, and even to start distinguishing between their totally different kinds.
That may depend as an “monumental” breakthrough, says Joseph Conlon on the College of Oxford, because it may assist theorists determine between the varied unified theories on the desk. “It could be a basically new…
