Graviton.

"When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility." - Gilbert Chesterton 

The graviton is proving to be the toughest particle to find.


So hard in fact, that some physicists have annulled its existence.


As you can tell by the name, it exerts gravity. Or is basically a force carrier, but for gravity. Even using gravitons in equations are proving hard, well in the classical mechanics. String Theory is one of the answers for the graviton. I will be going over the basics of String Theory soon.

Even in a detector the size of Jupiter, it would take around 10 year for the machine to detect just one graviton. Physicists today are looking for the losses of energy in collisions at the LHC, to show the graviton has took some away, but it has not yet proven to be anywhere near successful. 

Not many theories can even show the graviton might exist, not even String Theory has a solid, believable Theory of Gravity. - so proving that the graviton exists will  be a mammoth task.

If it is proven though, it will cement our current knowledge of gravity - which according to classical physics is just the manifestation of space time due to a large mass. It will also be added to the standard model, a huge equation [and picture] that has organised what you could call a particle zoo. Gluons, W+ bosons etc

There is not much to be said about the graviton, as it has not been discovered, but I will say this - it is mass less, so it must travel at c [speed of light] in a vacuum, if it travels slower than c, than it must have mass. But it is expected to be mass less as gravity has an unlimited range.

Thanks for reading, Ben.