A Fifth Force of Nature may have been discovered !

So far science has discovered four forces (the weak force, the strong force, electromagnetic force and of course gravity) of nature but one more could just be added, hidden in natures' entangled tree, physicists in hungary believe they may have found it.
   

Starting from the larger end of the scale, gravity is responsible for holding together the planets and gravity, and electromagnetic force is in charge of keeping our molecules together.

 

“At the smallest level are the two other forces: the strong nuclear force is the glue for atomic nuclei, and the weak nuclear force helps some atoms go through radioactive decay,”  writes Ryan F. Mandelbaum for popular science “These forces seemed to explain the physics we can observe, more or less.”

Evidence of this fifth force was spotted last year, when a team from the  Hungarian Academy of Science reported that they’d fired protons at lithium-7, and in the fall out, had detected a brand new super-light boson that was only 34 times heavier than an electron.

 

The US team, led by Jonathan Feng from the University of California, Irvine, showed that the data didn’t conflict with previous experiments, and calculated that the new boson could indeed be carrying a fifth fundamental force – which is when the science world started to get interested.

That paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed as yet, so we can’t get too excited, but it was uploaded so that the other physicists could scrutinise the results and add their own findings, which is what’s happening now.

As Nature reports, researchers around the world are racing to conduct follow-up tests to verify the Hungarian discovery, and we can expect results within around a year.

But if you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering, what does a super-light boson have to do with a new force of nature?

 HOW IT WAS DONE

The Hungarian team, led by physicist Attila Krasznahorkay, were looking for. To do that, they fired protons at thin targets of lithium-7, a collision that created unstable beryllium-8 nuclei, which then decayed into pairs of electrons and positrons.

“According to the standard model, physicists should see that the number of observed pairs drops as the angle separating the trajectory of the electron and positron increases,”    Edwin Cartlidge writes for Nature.

“Perhaps we are seeing our first glimpse into physics beyond the visible Universe.”

But that wasn’t what the team saw – at about 140 degrees, the number of these pairs jumped, creating a little bump before dropping off again at higher angles.

This ‘bump’ was evidence of a new particle, according to Krasznahorkay and his team. They calculated that the mass of this new particle would be around 17 megaelectronvolts, which isn’t what was expected for the ‘dark photon’, but could be evidence of something else entirely.

“We are very confident about our experimental results,” Krasznahorkay told Nature. He says that the chance of this bump being an anomaly is around 1 in 200 billion (but let’s keep in mind that no other team has confirmed this as yet.)

The analysis by Feng’s team in the US didn’t involve a repeat of the experiment, but simply used calculations to verify that, theoretically at least, the proposed super-light boson Krasznahorkay detected could be capable of carrying a new fundamental force.