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Forgotten Particle Could Answer The Mystery of Why We Exist, Say Physicists

The Big Bang should have been the start and the end of the Universe, as we understand it.  In many ways, the cosmos likes balance, so it's thought the Big Bang should have made matter and antimatter in equal amounts, leading them to destroy each other and leave only space and energy.  But an infinitesimal imbalance existed at some point in the early Universe that allowed matter to exist, which is important because humans and other stuff tend to be made of matter.  Physicists now propose a new explanation for that imbalance, suggesting that our cosmic savior could have been something just as mysterious: an overlooked, hypothesized 'ghost' particle that could potentially solve multiple cosmological mysteries.  In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Rishav Roshan from the University of Southampton and Sudipta Show from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur used models and calculations to describe how this "sterile neutrino" could have allowed matter to exist.  The sterile neutrino is so called because it ignores the forces that act on ordinary matter, feeling only gravity and an extraordinarily weak pull from the Higgs.

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