Are there Higgs bosons in space?

Rather than using a 17-mile-long collider, can't we just find them out there?

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, report that they're hot on the trail of an elusive elementary particle known as the Higgs boson. It's only a matter of time before they'll have the infamous "God particle" in handcuffs, they say. But after years of particle- and head-bashing at the LHC, one burning question is whether there's an easier way to do this. Instead of constructing an 17-mile-long, high-energy collider to generate a Higgs particle from scratch, couldn't we just go look for one in nature?

And if so, where in space might it be?

John Gunion, first author of "The Higgs Hunter's Guide" (Basic Books, 1990) and a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, said Higgs bosons regularly pop into existence all over space., 

Quantum fluctuations — momentary bursts of energy from nowhere that are permitted by the rules of quantum mechanics — cause pairs of the particles to spontaneously arise out of the vacuum, then annihilate each other an instant later.

Because these freebie Higgs have extremely high energies, the rules of quantum mechanics dictate that they don't get to stick around for as long as lesser particles would. So, if you're a Higgs hunter, how much time do you have to catch these bosons before they disappear? "Shorter than 1-trillionth-of-1-trillionth of a second," Gunion said.

Gordon Kane, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan and co-author of "The Higgs Hunter's Guide," said that a quantum fluctuation is rare in any one place. "But there are lots of places it can happen (all of space), so altogether it happens pretty often, but you aren't there to see it."

Aside from strange quantum effects, there are several other events in space that produce Higgs bosons, the physicists said.

"Black holes give off pairs of Higgs bosons, among many other things," Gunion said. "They produce these Higgs particles at their horizons, and if you put a detector there, you would see them. But the detector would be gobbled up pretty quick by the black hole."

Unfortunately we can't just aim our earthbound telescopes at black holes and hope to glimpse a Higgs, because the particle will have decayed long before getting here, he added. 

Supernovas, the explosions of dying stars, produce bursts of particles that are moving fast enough to create Higgs bosons when they collide. (Imagine the particle collisions at the LHC, but in space.)

However, getting a close look at a Higgs from a supernova is just as tricky as peering at one from a black hole: Your detector would have to be sitting next to the supernova aimed at exactly the right place at exactly the right time to see the Higgs before it decays. And then, of course, the detector would get destroyed by the stellar explosion.

Lastly, perhaps the deepest question of all is why Higgs bosons — which draw so much attention from scientists because they are the particles that imbue all other particles with their mass — don't exist everywhere all the time. In short, if there's no Higgs in me, why do I not weigh zero pounds?

"That's a complicated question," said Craig Blocker, a Higgs-hunting physicist at Brandeis University. "It has to do with quantum mechanics. In quantum theory, all particles correspond to what we call fields. For example, electromagnetic fields are what photons (particles of light) correspond to, and the Higgs particle corresponds to the Higgs field. Each particle has its own field, and most fields are everywhere all the time. But you have to get enough energy to excite those fields so that it looks like a particle to us. Otherwise we don't know the field is there."

Quantum fluctuations, black holes and supernovas all have what it takes to make the Higgs field look like a Higgs particle. However, because these events happen too far away and for too short a time, it seems that the LHC is our best bet.

Msn.com

Astronomers Find Biggest Black Holes Yet

 Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought.

 Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the universe.
 One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.
 The other black hole, a graveyard for the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, more or less, lurks in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another cluster known as Abell 1367, about 331 million light-years away in Leo.
 “These are the most massive reliably measured black holes ever,” Nicholas J. McConnell, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an e-mail, referring to the new observations.
 These results are more than just cool and record-setting. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope over the years have shown that such monster black holes seem to inhabit the centers of all galaxies — the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole. Researchers said the new work could shed light on the role these black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies.
 The previous record-holder was in the galaxy M87, a member of the Virgo cluster some 54 million light-years from here, where a black hole weighed in at a mere 6.3 billion solar masses. The new black holes, however, were even larger than astronomers had predicted based on the earlier measurements, suggesting that there is something special about how the most massive galaxies are built.
 “Measurements of these massive black holes will help us understand how their host galaxies were assembled, and how the holes achieved such monstrous mass,” Mr. McConnell said.

 Mr. McConnell and his thesis adviser, Chung-Pei Ma, led a team of astronomers who used telescopes in Hawaii, Texas and outer space to weigh the black holes in the centers of galaxies by clocking the speeds of stars zooming around them; the faster the stars are going, the more gravity — and thus mass — is needed to keep the stars from flying away. They report their work in the journal Nature, which will be published online on Wednesday.
 Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, called the new work “an incremental step,” noting that the study of these monsters has been a part of his life for a long time. “It’s good to learn about even bigger ones,” he said.
 Black holes, regions of space where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from it, are among the weirdest of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s curved-space theory of gravity, general relativity — so weird that Einstein himself did not believe it. He once wrote to a friend that there ought to be a law of nature forbidding such a thing.
 But he was wrong. And some of his successors, like Dr. Rees and a colleague at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, have spent their careers studying the implications for physics of objects that can wrap spacetime around themselves like a magician’s cloak and disappear.
 Such is the fate, astronomers agree, of some massive stars once they run out of fuel and collapse upon themselves. Indeed the galaxy is littered with stellar-mass black holes detectable by the X-rays spit by doomed matter swirling around them like water in a drain. And there seem to be giant ones in the heart of every galaxy.

 One question astronomers would like answered is how these black holes got so big, billions of times bigger than a typical dead star. Dr. Ma described it as a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument, explaining that black holes could grow by merging with other black holes as galaxies merge to get bigger — “nature” — or by swallowing gas around them — “nurture.”
 “It’s a bit like asking: Are taller children produced by taller parents or by eating a lot of spinach?” Dr. Ma wrote in an e-mail. “For black holes we are not sure.”

 Astronomers also think the supermassive black holes in galaxies could be the missing link between the early universe and today. In the early days of the universe, quasars, thought to be powered by giant black holes in cataclysmic feeding frenzies, were fountaining energy into space.
 Where are those quasars now? The new work supports a growing suspicion that those formerly boisterous black holes are among us now, but, having stopped their boisterous growth, are sleeping.
 Mr. McConnell said, “Our discovery of extremely massive black holes in the largest present-day galaxies suggests that these galaxies could be the ancient remains of voracious ancestors.”
Let’s try not to awaken them.


Nytimes.com