Question: Is there any matter other than quarks, electrons and photons?
Asked by mastervet33 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 19 Mar 2012.
Keywords: electron, matter, photon, subatomic
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Quarks make up protons and neutrons, which are the main types of mass we can see in the universe.
Photons aren’t really matter – they have no mass.
Electrons are part of a family of particles called leptons, which includes things like neutrinos, but also muons and some other stuff. These are also part of matter.
However, we know that there’s matter out there we can’t see – dark matter. We don’t know what it’s made of, but it actually must have a mass many times more than the matter we can see.
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Simply, yes! There’s the rest of the leptons of which electrons are one, and there’s antimatter too (though it depends on your definition of matter!)
If you like quarks, listen to the awesome song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kXkWXSXRA
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Yes lots – we think that about 90% or more of all the matter which has gravity in the Universe is “dark matter” which is different from quarks, electrons etc. (which we collectively call “bayonic matter”).
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There are many types of leptons, such as electrons and then also muons and tau particles. Then there are neutrinos, of which there are 3 types. So 6 leptons in total. (Plus, for all of these, there are the anti-particles making 12 leptons and anti-leptons together).
Then there are the types of quarks, and the massless particles such as photons. This last one is a boson, and there are a few types of those: the most famous is the Higgs Boson that people are trying to track down at the moment.
Then there are a whole host of invented particles to explain certain physics. My favourite would be the WIMPs: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. :-p
And Karen has a good point: most matter is something we call dark and we have very little idea what that is made up of.
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