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Chapter 302 Proton Decay

Before this moment, even before human civilization had become a secondary civilization and before it was colonized by the Eta civilization, a lot of research had been done on the grand unified theory that unifies the three basic forces: the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force. A lot of theoretical work has been done and certain gains have been made.

In physics, theory always comes before experiment, and that's normal. Just like Han Yang has not yet unified the three forces to become a third-level civilization, he has already begun preliminary theoretical research work on the theory of universality that unifies gravity.

Among these gains, the most important one is the Standard Model.

The Standard Model is a theory that describes the three fundamental forces, the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force, and the elementary particles of all matter that they are composed of. However, it fails to unify the three fundamental forces.

The Grand Unified Theory is an extension of the Standard Model. It assumes that at higher energy levels, above 100 GeV, these three forces will merge into one force.

Only at low energy levels will these three forces split due to symmetry breaking.

Now, Han Yang has integrated the achievements of his predecessors, coupled with the scientific community of the entire human civilization and his own continuous research and experiments over the past hundreds of years, to propose a more comprehensive and credible grand unification. theory.

But the current problem is that some values ​​​​in this set of theories cannot be determined. At the same time, Han Yang does not know whether it is correct.

A qualified theory should be able to predict future events and be verified in experiments.

At this moment, Han Yang fell into some difficulties.

Because the grand unified theory predicts the phenomenon of proton decay, but he did not observe this phenomenon in experiments.

He could only continue to look for possibilities to adjust the theory while conducting experiments to try to break through this shackles, but his ten years of hard work came to nothing.

One day, the Ultra Deep Space Telescope Array, composed of a total of 3260 optical telescopes arranged in the solar system, reported a slightly strange phenomenon to Han Yang.

A huge galaxy located more than 10 billion light-years away seems to have a slightly abnormal number of stars, which conflicts with Han Yang's existing theory of galaxy evolution.

The theory of galaxy evolution mastered by Han Yang has been verified by tens of millions of extragalactic galaxies and is considered correct by Han Yang. At this moment, a special case was suddenly discovered, which immediately aroused Han Yang's interest.

"The galaxies formed just 3 million years after the birth of the universe...it's really spectacular."

Looking at the data observed by the telescope array, Han Yang sighed in his heart.

As we all know, the speed of light is limited. The light emitted by galaxies more than 10 billion light-years away takes more than 10 billion years to reach the solar system and be observed.

The appearance of the river system numbered SNG-6015 that Han Yang sees at this moment is actually what it looked like more than billion years ago, only million years after the Big Bang.

This young and large galaxy contains many massive blue-white first-generation stars and has an extremely active galactic core.

Han Yang believed that there was a supermassive black hole. It is estimated that its mass is at least 9 million times that of the sun. Endless interstellar dust and stellar matter poured into the black hole, triggering its extremely strong jets and releasing unimaginable energy.

It is actually a quasar. But because the jet does not face the solar system directly, humans cannot observe its ultra-high brightness.

Although this river system is huge, it is still small compared to the Milky Way. If it were near the Milky Way, it would probably become a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

Its total mass is estimated to be about 50 billion times the mass of the sun, of which about 9 million times the mass of the sun is concentrated on the central black hole, and its size is about 2000 light-years.

It was such a distant river system with abundant and active interstellar dust that made Han Yang aware of the anomaly.

It has too few stars.

According to normal stellar evolution theory, there should be at least about 10 billion stars inside it. But the actual situation is that Han Yang only saw a maximum of about 7 million stars.

There is a gap of up to 30% between reality and theoretical predictions. This is no longer something that can be explained by statistical error or chance.

Han Yang became very interested in this and mobilized more observation forces and scientific researchers to study this remote and small river system.

Gradually, more observational data are generated. Through these data, Han Yang eliminated all the possibilities that he had thought before. Until no more theories can explain this anomaly.

Han Yang was puzzled.

No matter where you look at it, it shouldn't look like this. But the reality is that it just looks like this.

What went wrong?

The research on this abnormal river system only occupied one millionth of Han Yang's computing power. After all, there are too many things that need to be studied at the moment, and it is impossible for Han Yang to devote all his computing power to this one problem.

But with just one millionth of the computing power, an inspiration suddenly came to me one day.

"Is it possible that it has something to do with proton decay?"

Han Yang conveniently incorporated the proton decay data predicted by the grand unified theory into the star number estimation model.

It is predicted that the decay of protons will produce neutral pions and positrons. The neutral pion will continue to decay into two photons.

Perhaps... the photons formed by the decay of protons hinder the further fusion of interstellar dust clouds, preventing stars from forming, and causing the overall number of stars to be so much less than in a normal galaxy?

After some calculations, Han Yang found that if the number of stars is to be reduced to this level through the proton decay effect, then the lifespan of protons should be within 10^20 years.

But this is obviously impossible. Han Yang has proved through experiments that if proton decay really exists, then the minimum lifespan of protons should be more than 10^33 years.

There is a difference of more than ten orders of magnitude between the two. Now that things have developed to this point, this original conjecture should be abandoned. But Han Yang once again discovered that if the proton lifetime is determined to be 10^20 years, a series of other anomalies in this river system can be explained.

Even some anomalies related to black hole jets can be fully explained.

This confused Han Yang again.

what's the situation?

Mathematical calculations and theoretical predictions are so consistent with actual phenomena that it does not seem to be explained simply by coincidence.

This seems to imply that in this distant galaxy, the lifespan of a proton seems to be really 10^20 years. But in the solar system, Han Yang can be sure that the lifespan of protons is at least 10^33 years.

Does the lifespan of protons also change? It decays slower here, and faster there?

If so, what exactly causes this difference?

After thinking about it, Han Yang finally focused his gaze on the behemoth hidden in the core of the galaxy.

"Could it be...the gravitational field of a supermassive black hole?"

Even at this moment, Han Yang still doesn't know what the nature of gravity is. He has not even been able to complete the quantization of gravitons, let alone unify gravity into one force.

But this does not affect his assumption of this conclusion.

"If it's a super gravitational field... I can actually conduct some experiments."

There are no black holes around the solar system.

There isn't even a small black hole, nor a neutron star. However, there are a few white dwarfs.

"The gravitational field around the white dwarf is also very strong. Why not do an experiment there."

Han Yang made up his mind.

Detecting proton decay requires the same kind of scientific equipment as detecting neutrinos.

Neutrino telescope.

In fact, the neutrino telescope was originally built to observe proton decay. However, the proton decay phenomenon was not seen. Instead, neutrinos were observed. As a result, this thing turned out to be a special tool for detecting neutrinos.

But the neutrino telescope has a hard requirement, that is, it must be located extremely deep underground. Only in this way can all kinds of external radiation be shielded.

If there is no thick rock formation, this effect can only be achieved through artificial shielding layers.

According to Han Yang's estimation, in order to achieve sufficient shielding standards next to a white dwarf, he must build a solid metal ball with a radius of more than 4 kilometers. The mass of such a metal ball is at least one trillion tons.

Building such a metal ball with a mass of one trillion tons next to a white dwarf star is beyond the capabilities of even Han Yang's engineering capabilities.

There's nothing we can do about it. But Han Yang immediately came up with an alternative.

If artificial shielding is not feasible, can natural stars be used instead?

Han Yang immediately retrieved the information and immediately discovered that there was an asteroid surrounding the white dwarf star in the triple star system 40 Eridanus.

The size of this asteroid is approximately 86*75*40 kilometers. Based on this calculation, if you build a neutrino telescope at its core, the weakest part of its shielding layer will be 20 kilometers thick rock layer, which can fully meet your requirements.

Then there is nothing to say.

Under Han Yang's leadership, preparations for a huge scientific expedition fleet immediately began, and it would set off in just three months.

After a long voyage of about 40 years, the scientific research fleet finally arrived.

In this magical galaxy with three stars rotating around each other, the scientific research fleet began its work.

The first thing to do is to land on the asteroid.

Usually this is simple. But as long as extreme stars like white dwarfs are involved, even the simplest things will become very difficult.

The asteroid is too close to the white dwarf star. The distance between the two is only about 10,000 kilometers.

Normally, such a close distance would cause the asteroid to be directly torn apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf.

However, this asteroid has a rather peculiar orbit and a special structure - Han Yang suspects that it was split from the core of a large planet. Its main components are iron and nickel, which is smaller than ordinary rocky asteroids. The structural strength is much higher, which prevents it from being torn apart.

Such a close distance means that the asteroid must have an extremely high speed to orbit the white dwarf star without falling off.

Its speed reached about two thousand kilometers per second. At this speed, it can rotate around the white dwarf star with a radius of about 7000 kilometers every less than one minute.

As a last resort, the spacecraft of the scientific research fleet could only enter the orbit of the white dwarf star, have roughly the same speed, and then approach the asteroid bit by bit.

(End of this chapter)