In “Are there Higgs bosons in space?” (Science on MSNBC.com, 12/14/2011), Natalie Wolchover asks,
“Rather than using a 17-mile-long collider, can’t we just find them out there?”, explaining, 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?
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.
Yet the little devils are explicitly avoiding the Large Hadron Collider … hmmm …