It is the big questions that haunt humanity the most. Questions like, "Are we alone in the universe?", "How did life originate on the planet?", "Why Does The Universe Exist?" and many others have perplexed us for eons.
As we strive to further humanity's knowledge pool, we might one day get the answers to these questions. Some of them have a philosophical side to them, so it might take quite some time.
One such question is about why the universe exists. It is often asked both from a philosophical point of view as well as scientific. From the former viewpoint, we want to know the purpose of reality and our lives. From the viewpoint of science, we want to know how come the events of the big bang result in such a huge universe.
According to what we know about the big bang, the universe shouldn't exist in the first place. The fact that it does and that too in a seemingly infinite size has been making scientists go crazy! But now, we might finally get the answer.
Why Does It Exist?
Most of you might know that the big bang resulted in the birth of our universe. However, not many people know that the events of the big bang spewed an almost equal amount of matter and antimatter. If you don't know what antimatter is, well, it is anti...matter - the opposite of a matter.
So, if a matter particle and an antimatter particle collide, they annihilate each other completely. This begs the question, "if the big bang spewed an almost equal number of both of these, why is there a universe today?" Everything should have just gotten annihilated. The answer is in the question. The big bang "almost" created equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
During creation, there was one extra matter particle for every billion matter-antimatter pairs. This smallest of mismatch is what made our universe possible. Can you imagine that? Every atom today is 1 in a billion pairs. And still the size of the universe is unimaginably large.
But scientists don't know what caused that imbalance. If they could find out why it would answer why the universe exists. That is exactly what they have been trying to find out in the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment, the results of which were published in the journal Nature.
Basically, they have propounded a new theory called leptogenesis. It posits that the big bang spewed a massive number of subatomic particles called neutrinos. And when these broke apart eventually, the might have formed more matter than antimatter. It is this small imbalance that might have just helped in the creation of our universe.
The findings of the scientists will need to go through a rigorous process of experimentation and peer review. But if everyone gets the same results, then we will finally have our answer.