The Pressure Inside Every Proton is 10x That Inside Neutron Stars

Neutron stars are famous for combining a very high-density with a very small radius. As the remnants of massive stars that have undergone gravitational collapse, the interior of a neutron star is compressed to the point where they have similar pressure conditions to atomic nuclei. Basically, they become so dense that they experience the same amount of internal pressure as the equivalent of 2.6 to 4.1 quadrillion Suns!

In spite of that, neutron stars have nothing on protons, according to a recent study by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. After conducting the first measurement of the mechanical properties of subatomic particles, the scientific team determined that near the center of a proton, the pressure is about 10 times greater than the pressure in the heart of a neutron star.

The study which describes the team’s findings, titled “The pressure distribution inside the proton“, recently appeared in the scientific journal Nature. The study was led by Volker Burkert, a nuclear physicist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), and co-authored by Latifa Elouadrhiri and Francois-Xavier Girod – also from the TJNAF.

Cross-section of a neutron star. Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Robert Schulze

Basically , they found that the pressure conditions at the center of a proton were 100 decillion pascals – about 10 times the pressure at the heart of a neutron star. However, they also found that pressure inside the particle is not uniform, and drops off as the distance from the center increases. As Volker Burkert, the Jefferson Lab Hall B Leader, explained:

“We found an extremely high outward-directed pressure from the center of the proton, and a much lower and more extended inward-directed pressure near the proton’s periphery… Our results also shed light on the distribution of the strong force inside the proton. We are providing a way of visualizing the magnitude and distribution of the strong force inside the proton. This opens up an entirely new direction in nuclear and particle physics that can be explored in the future.”

Protons are composed of three quarks that are bound together by the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces that government the Universe – the other being electromagnetism, gravity and weak nuclear forces. Whereas electromagnetism and gravity produce the effects that govern matter on the larger scales, weak and strong nuclear forces govern matter at the subatomic level.

Previously, scientists thought that it was impossible to obtain detailed information about subatomic particles. However, the researchers were able to obtain results by pairing two theoretical frameworks with existing data, which consisted of modelling systems that rely on electromagnetism and gravity. The first model concerns generalized parton distributions (GDP) while the second involve gravitational form factors.

Quarks inside a proton experience a force an order of magnitude greater than matter inside a neutron star. Credit: DOE’s Jefferson Lab

Patron modelling refers to modeling subatomic entities (like quarks) inside protons and neutrons, which allows scientist to create 3D images of a proton’s or neutron’s structure (as probed by the electromagnetic force). The second model describes the scattering of subatomic particles by classical gravitational fields, which describes the mechanical structure of protons when probed via the gravitational force.

As noted, scientists previously thought that this was impossible due to the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction. However, recent theoretical work has indicated that it could be possible to determine the mechanical structure of a proton using electromagnetic probes as a substitute for gravitational probes. According to Latifa Elouadrhiri – a Jefferson Lab staff scientist and co-author on the paper – that is what their team set out to prove.

“This is the beauty of it. You have this map that you think you will never get,” she said. “But here we are, filling it in with this electromagnetic probe.”

For the sake of their study, the team used the DOE’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the TJNAF to create a beam of electrons. These were then directed into the nuclei of atoms where they interacted electromagnetically with the quarks inside protons via a process called deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS). In this process, an electron exchanges a virtual photon with a quark, transferring energy to the quark and proton.

The bare masses of all 6 flavors of quarks, proton and electron, shown in proportional volume. Credit: Wikipedia/Incnis Mrsi

Shortly thereafter, the proton releases this energy by emitting another photon while remaining intact. Through this process, the team was able to produced detailed information of the mechanics going on in inside the protons they probed. As Francois-Xavier Girod, a Jefferson Lab staff scientist and co-author on the paper, explained the process:

“There’s a photon coming in and a photon coming out. And the pair of photons both are spin-1. That gives us the same information as exchanging one graviton particle with spin-2. So now, one can basically do the same thing that we have done in electromagnetic processes — but relative to the gravitational form factors, which represent the mechanical structure of the proton.”

The next step, according to the research team, will be to apply the technique to even more precise data that will soon be released. This will reduce uncertainties in the current analysis and allow the team to reveal other mechanical properties inside protons – like the internal shear forces and the proton’s mechanical radius. These results, and those the team hope to reveal in the future, are sure to be of interest to other physicists.

“We are providing a way of visualizing the magnitude and distribution of the strong force inside the proton,” said Burkert. “This opens up an entirely new direction in nuclear and particle physics that can be explored in the future.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, it will bring us closer to understanding how the four fundamental forces of the Universe interact. While scientists understand how electromagnetism and weak and strong nuclear forces interact with each other (as described by Quantum Mechanics), they are still unsure how these interact with gravity (as described by General Relativity).

If and when the four forces can be unified in a Theory of Everything (ToE), one of the last and greatest hurdles to a complete understanding of the Universe will finally be removed.

An interesting suggestion.

That if taken literally, face value for what you said that would make a black hole something like a proton star.

I would suggest that possibility may support the idea that the universe exist within a black hole that is itself in some other, bigger universe. Moreover, based on some speculations of mine from decades ago, it suggest to me a possible solution to what dark matter is: it is simply us, everything we already see, but because we see it as the normal stuff of matter there’s a perceptual disconnect between that it is also the substance of the black hole our universe exists in.

Madness moving on to crazytown to be sure ... so here’s background to the madness I suggest.

Sometime ago I was watching a number of shows about black holes and the universe. In particular they, in one episode, were discussing the problem of black holes that are too massive to explain, not just now but at very early points in the universe. In the other episode they were rambling off ideas on the nature of the universe, including the view that our universe actually exists within a black hole in some other universe.

The amazing thing to me was that they didn’t link up these two things up.

Please bear with me for a bit.

If a “universe” existed within a black hole, what would the perception of there basically being an unfolding of dimensionality within said black hole be to an outside observer in that larger universe? Someone who in their understanding of existence is not entirely unlike ourselves?

I would submit to you that the black hole would appear physically larger than it should be, that it would be in fact be puffed up and it would appear to be more massive, and this is because a black holes size is inferred by its effect on space and matter around it, rather than being direct observations of it actual mass..

Here I want to suggest more crazy: that the gravitational effects, what we observe and infer size based on, of a black hole are a function of its surface area of its event horizon and not necessarily of its literal mass.

So from the outside because (for whatever cause such a thing may be happening) there is unfolding dimensionality within what was once compacted dimensionality, the darn thing appears bigger than it is and possibly bigger than it can or should be.

And they are possibly scratching their heads too as they ponder it.

Now, within that unfolding dimensionality space and time for that subordinate universe are happening. The black hole is the common substance, and its effects simply pervade that universe, but to those within ... space and time.

For those physicist who have made this suggestion I’m sure they’ve got their own ideas about why there could be a Big Bang at the heart of some black hole and that the release of energy result in said parent black hole having a baby universe. They didn’t really go into that.

At this point we’ve reached circular reasoning and without considering something else (about how or why a black hole that’s basically exploding could give rise to a subordinate universe) we’d just keep going around the proverbial mulberry bush.

So ... here I want to bring up my own speculations from years back. These happened for the purest and most noble of reasons short of praising the Lord, they happened just for fun.

It began with me making an assumption and then following the logic of it till I thought I had something to compare to the observable universe as I understood it. Moreover it didn’t need to be what was done before. That’s not the bugaboo or an example of arrogance some might think it is.

Not to sound pessimistic but there’s something true in all human endeavors, a danger inherent when something becomes acceptable as true but which is not really accurate or true enough to be true and it is this: where standing on the shoulders of Giants helps you to see more and farther that’s only the case if they weren’t digging a hole instead of standing tall. If you don’t think this is the case you might ask an archaeologist or anthropologist with a good career to think about physical evidences that may add up to show that the accepted view of man may have so many holes the Swiss would sell it as cheese.

Pondering alternatives isn’t a problem if you’re willing to let go of something once observable evidence simply contradicts the idea, or what the idea seems to ends up demanding. So, for fun is pretty much the perfect reason for pondering because it doesn’t have to become something more, and can be let go of as easily as it was picked up.

Or such were my thoughts at the time.

So, what to assume?

Well, there seemed to be an observable difference between things normally thought of as dimensions: space and time. Simply we translate across and through space always while moving in time, and even if we could literally stand still in space we would still be moving in time, and our motions in space are not observably like our motions in time because at a minimum it takes something special to turn around in time. Even then space has, or seems to have, more dimensional choices than time does.

So if time is a dimension it is a very different sort of dimension than space is.

It gets worse for time as a dimension in that in the ordinary course of existence not only do we move just in one direction in time we cannot really even have space without also moving in time. That points A and B represent not just a difference in space but a differential of time.

Back in the day, right or wrong, here I turned to the subatomic to reason this through.

Atoms, all matter, consists of discrete particles and seemingly empty space. Indeed atoms are almost entirely empty space. These particles are whizzing about in time and it is their movement, experienced through differential time, that lets them appear to have volume. So essentially matter, because of structure, which is movement and therefore time sourced, is less dense than unstructured particles.

But what of the particles themselves? Well, they aren’t Greek atoms, little indivisible things, but made up of other things and they too can be under certain circumstances blown all to heck and will fall apart into those things ... unless of course blowing them apart CREATES those things and they exist in the first place because non-particles subreality somehow interact to create them. BUT in any case they are not seemingly poofs of volume and even tinier sunparticles in a not much more teeny near void as the larger atoms are. They are dense.

Into this mix I also threw in, perchance not surprisingly, the idea that with sufficient gravity the perception of time slows AND all that fluffing up of matter goes away.

So, what to assume so I could have some fun? How about time is not a dimension but is instead a force?

So that’s where I started. And it didn’t last long at that level. The apparent opposing nature of time vs gravity became the ball, literally, as in spin. Both are a outward expression of something more fundamental to themselves and what separated one from the other is the associated spin, or eddy, or current, or folding upon itself ... however I tried to imagine it.

Because of bias that I openly embraced: positive “spin” is time and when this other thing coexists with energy it causes dimensionality; negative “spin” is, or rather are, the other forces, notably gravity, though there is more than just the two possibilities in this primal force, as I called it, just as there should be opportunities for differences to arise from the energy side of things. But from this primal force side gravity and time are at least nearly opposed. That as positive spin dominates dimensionality grows and things in that dimensionality ultimately seem to lose structure or else harder vacuums arise. The negative spin results in dimensionality going away when it really goes to town. But really neither on average “goes to town” and for this I could turn to old Einstein.

My math such as it was, was more than a little dodgy, but I realized that the balancing act between gravity and time that is the average state of existence would really end up being a high energy state. That any normal sort of existence would be seething with energy that because of the balance between time and gravity it would all more or less stay where it is because this bit isn’t much more or less energetic than that bit.

It would only be where average became something hyper, either hyper-dense in a singularity or hyper-vacuum in an absolute void of particles that it all could fall apart and all that energy suddenly have no reason to stick around and everywhere to go.

And as Henry Blake once said: it would just go boom.

Cool, cool, I thought, there was supposed to be a super dense something before the Big Bang and then it exploded out creating space. But I soon realized that as space expanded hyper-vacuums would happen and there would be massive Little Big Bangs and that these would result in a cosmos that would look like bubbles of galaxies squashed up against each other surrounding vast voids around the center of each Little Big Bang.

Well, the universe didn’t look like that! So true to the starting point my fun was done and I set it down and left it there.

But then a few years later someone published a 3D pie section of the observed universe and guess what they saw?

So reluctantly I returned to one professor to talk about my speculations and I was at least entertaining him right up until the moment that I had to confess that within this idea the ether of old had returned and that light was an energetic propagation of a waveform as time impressed itself on space (and, if you really want to seem a scientific heretic, that sound, a mechanistic propagation of a waveform through matter, happens the way it does because light behaves the way it does first in its turn) ... at which point my welcome I’d been given became raaaather chilly.

But perceptually this sort of idea provides a way to understand how a black hole could become the parent of a subordinate universe. It isn’t that the thing is really less dense where it’s still a black hole but that it got to a point at its core it just went boom, and the structure and dimensionality got a hold. It’s not a huuuge difference but to those inside of it it sure may seem to be. Meanwhile we’re still in a black hole and it’s everywhere so of course we would see the effects of gravity and even energy we just can’t account for.

Ironically, this even seems to address the one blatant inconsistency that really doomed my old notions even though the universe did in fact end up looking like bubbles of galaxies (I went to the professor not thinking I was right but that maybe there was something right to be had out of it even though it was broken) and it is this: why would a Little Big Bang always remain a Little Big Bang?

Energy is energy, and if from a chunk of ultra dense or literally nothing at all so structure starts to fall apart in an outward rush it just goes boom.

Well, now that I think of it, if the “hyper-vacuum” is only relative to an environment that’s already ultra dense it couldn’t do much, and never would just keep going. Those booms only serve to fluff up the parent black hole a bit, not to cause it fall apart. They would still be traumatic to any poor slob too close to them when they first happen, but once they happen the bubbles just grow together like a bubble bath sudsing up.

Or such would be my worth everything you paid for them speculations at the moment.

So, back to your suggestion.

Well, what if black holes WERE proton stars? That would mean we had neutron and proton stars. Presumably in a star’s death, again just for fun, maybe sometimes they retain a charge? Maybe sometimes they don’t?

I wonder what an electron star is?

White holes?

Maybe dying stars sometimes forms circuits with other dying stars where energy goes from one place to another? Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

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