With the help of very ingenuous calculations, the physicist established the number of elementary particles in the visible universe.
Fanatical mathematicians who adore counting everything in the world have long wanted to know the answer to the fundamental question: how many particles are there in the universe? Considering that approximately 5 trillion hydrogen atoms can fit on just one pin head, and each of them consists of 4 elementary particles (1 electron and 3 quarks in a proton), it is safe to assume that the number of particles in the observable universe is beyond human representation.
Be that as it may, physics professor Tony Padilla of the University of Nottingham has developed a way to estimate the total number of particles in the universe, without taking into account photons or neutrinos, since they have no (or rather, practically no) mass:
For his calculations, the scientist used data obtained with the Planck telescope, which was used to measure the CMB, which is the oldest visible light radiation in the Universe and, thus, forms a semblance of its boundary. Thanks to the telescope, scientists were able to estimate the density and radius of the visible universe.
Another necessary variable is the fraction of matter contained in baryons. These particles are composed of three quarks, and the most famous baryons today are protons and neutrons, and therefore in his example Padilla considers them. Finally, for the calculation, you need to know the masses of the proton and neutron (which approximately coincide with each other), after which you can proceed to the calculations.
What does a physicist do? It takes the density of the visible universe, multiplies it by a fraction of the density of baryons alone, and then multiplies the result by the volume of the universe. He divides the resulting mass of all baryons in the Universe by the mass of one baryon and gets the total number of baryons. But we are not interested in baryons, our goal is elementary particles.
It is known that each baryon consists of three quarks - and that's what we need. Moreover, the total number of protons (as we all know from the school chemistry course) is equal to the total number of electrons, which are also elementary particles. In addition, astronomers have established that 75% of the substance in the Universe is represented by hydrogen, and the remaining 25% is helium, while other elements can be neglected in calculations of this scale. Padilla calculates the number of neutrons, protons and electrons, and then multiplies the first two positions by three - and we finally have the final result.
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More than three vigintillion.
328.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.
The most interesting thing is that, given the scale of the Universe, these particles do not even fill most of its total volume. As a result, there is only one (!) Elementary particle per cubic meter of the Universe.
Vasily Makarov