Physicists Find Missing Universe's Mass

Scientists like to solve unanswered questions, and one of the Big Questions is where is the "missing mass" predicted by the Standard Model of the Universe?

This model indicates the universe is made up of 5% Baryonic matter, which is all the gas, dust, stars, planets, people i.e. the visible universe. Dark Energy makes up about 70%. of the universe, and although not completely understood explains the discovery that not only is the universe expanding, but accellerating outwards, due to this Dark Energy field.

The remaining 25% of the universe comprises Cold Dark Matter, the so-called missing mass, composed of slow moving sub-atomic particles which are very difficult to detect. There are millions of these zinging through your body right now! They are capable of passing right through the Earth.

The Sun creates a flux of these "neutrinos", but only half the predicted amounts have been detected, so the question is where are the rest?

Scientists in Europe at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics announced in early June they had possibly solved the case of the missing neutrinos.

An experiment involved sending billions of neutrinos on a programmed journey from Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory near L'Aquila in central Italy. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) provided a laser-like beam composed of billions upon billions of muon neutrinos. Traveling at the speed of light, it took only 2.4 milliseconds to make the 730-kilometer trip. One variety called a muon-neutrino was actually seen to disappear, lending credence to a Nobel-winning 1969 hypothesis that the miniscule particles were shape-shifting into a new and unseen form called a tau particle. It took nearly four years after switching on the beam before the transformation was witnessed, as the neutrinos easily pass through matter, and are not deflected by electromagnetic fields used by physicists to bend and detect particle beams.

"This will be the long-awaited proof of this process. It was a missing piece of the puzzle," said Antonio Ereditato, a researcher at the Institute and spokesman for the OPERA group that carried out the study. "Whatever exists in the infinitely small always has repercussions in the infinitely big," Ereditato said.

"A model which could explain why the neutrino is so small without vanishing will have profound implications for the understanding of our universe -- how it was, how it evolved, and how it will eventually die."