Among the many particles that resulted from this crash were
bizarre objects called anti-hypertritons. Not only are these things antimatter,
but they're also what's called strange matter. Where normal atomic nuclei are
made of protons and neutrons (which are made of "up" quarks and
"down" quarks), strange nuclei also have so-called Lambda particles
that contain another flavor of quark called "strange" as well. These
Lambda particles orbit around the protons and neutrons.
If all that is a little much to straighten out, just think
of anti-hypertritons as several kinds of weird.
Though they normally don't exist on Earth, these particles
may be hiding in the universe in very hot, dense places like the centers of
some stars, and most likely were around when the universe was extremely young
and energetic, and all the matter was packed into a very small, sweltering
space.
"This is the first time they've ever been created in a laboratory
or a situation where they can be studied," said researcher Carl Gagliardi
of Texas A&M University. "We don't have anti-nuclei sitting around on
a shelf that we can use to put anti-strangeness into. Only a few anti-nuclei
have been observed so far."
These particles weren't around for too long, though – in
fact, they didn't last long enough to collide with normal matter and
annihilate. Instead they just decayed after a fraction of a billionth of a
second.
"That sounds like a really short time, but in fact on
the nuclear clock it's actually a long time," Gagliardi told SPACE.com.
"In that fraction of a billionth of a second that Lambda particle has already
gone around the nucleus as many times as the Earth has gone around the sun since
the solar system was created."
Ivan Pavlov on 28 Oct 14David Baum, University of Wisconsin, says: "All agree that eukaryotes arose from a symbiotic relationship between two cell types: bacteria that became mitochondria and a host cell, archaea, or a close relative of archaea, that became the cytoplasm and nucleus. This symbiosis explains the origin of mitochondria, but what about other eukaryotic structures, most notably the nucleus?" The Baums' inside-out theory provides a gradual path by which eukaryotic cells could have evolved. The first stage began with a bacterial cell whose outer membrane forms protrusions, which the Baums call 'blebs', that reached out from the cell. These protrusions trapped free-living mitochondria-like bacteria between them. Using the energy gained from being in close contact with bacteria (and using bacterial-derived lipids), cells were able to get bigger and expand the size of their blebs. The sides of the blebs formed the endoplasmic reticulum and their inner surfaces formed the outer membrane of the nucleus, with the original outer membrane of the archaeon becoming what we now call the inner nuclear membrane. Finally, the fusion of blebs with one another led to the formation of the plasma membrane. The result was the eukaryotic cell as we now know it. This inside-out theory is explained in more detail using a diagram in the research article (see notes to editors).
