THE BIG BANG -- What is that..?

THE BIG BANG -- What is that..?

The European Organisation
for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, will on Wednesday begin an experiment to
recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, which scientists believe gave birth
to the universe.


Its
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will seek to collide two beams of particles at close
to the speed of light. Scientists plan to circulate a beam in one direction
around the accelerator on September 10, and later send beams both ways to cause
collisions.

Following are some facts about the Big Bang and CERN's
particle-smashing experiment.:




RECREATING THE BIG BANG:


The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles
from the project's accelerator into the 27-km (17-mile) beam pipe of the
collider and steering them counter-clockwise around it for about 3 km (2 miles).




The collider aims to simulate conditions milliseconds after the "Big
Bang" which created the universe around 13.7 billion years ago.



The
collisions, in which both particle clusters will be travelling at the speed of
light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world
by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life
possible.



The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the "Higgs
Boson" after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated nearly 50 years
ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter
together.



WHAT IS THE BIG BANG?


Recreating a "Big Bang," which most scientists believe is the only
explanation of an expanding universe, ought to show how stars and planets came
together out of the primeval chaos that followed, the CERN team believe.




Its essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a tiny
speck about the size of a coin but in a state of extremely high temperature and
density.



The name "Big Bang" was coined in 1949 by British scientist
Fred Hoyle to disparage a then emerging theory about origins that countered his
own "steady state" view: that the universe had always existed and was evolving
but not expanding.



According to the Big-Bang model, the universe
expanded rapidly from a highly compressed primordial state, which resulted in a
significant decrease in density and temperature. Soon afterward, the dominance
of matter over antimatter (as observed today) may have been established by
processes that also predict proton decay. During this stage many types of
elementary particles may have been present. After a few seconds, the universe
cooled enough to allow the formation of certain nuclei.



The theory
predicts that definite amounts of hydrogen, helium, and lithium were produced.
Their abundances agree with what is observed today. About 1,000,000 years later
the universe was sufficiently cool for atoms to form.


src : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/