Tag: neutrons

Ask Ethan: Why don???t neutrons bind together?

Here in our Universe, almost every combination of fundamental particles you can imagine will lead to an unstable state. Anything containing a strange, charm, bottom, or top quark will decay in extremely short order, as will anything containing a muon or tau lepton, as well as their antiparticles. In...

What was it like when protons and neutrons formed?

The story of our cosmic history is one of an expanding and cooling Universe. As we progressed from a hot, dense, uniform state to a cold, sparse, clumpy one, a number of momentous events happened throughout our cosmic history. At the moment of the hot Big Bang, the Universe was filled with all sorts...