HOW lengthy is a chunk of string? On this case, so long as your entire universe is huge. However then cosmic strings aren’t your common twine. Thinner than a proton and stretching for billions of sunshine years, they’d propagate by area at nigh-on the pace of sunshine, fuelled by – and containing – the hardly possible energies that existed on the massive bang, the place they originated.

Or no less than that’s the thought. Cosmic strings are among the many most excessive phenomena theorists have ever dreamed up, and but there are sound causes to think about them. They’re “one of the believable, testable predictions of unified theories”, says Neil Turok, a physicist on the College of Edinburgh, UK – referring to theories that search to explain how the elemental forces of nature had been merged, after which diverged, within the very early universe.

We’re but to search out any clear proof for the existence of cosmic strings. However up to now yr, astronomers have noticed a slew of anomalies – from inexplicably massive galaxies to surprisingly formed clusters – that recommend we could lastly be inside touching distance of those enigmatic threads. What’s extra, if considered one of these hints does maintain up, we now have the instruments to verify the existence of cosmic strings as soon as and for all, and even to start distinguishing between their totally different varieties.

That will rely as an “monumental” breakthrough, says Joseph Conlon on the College of Oxford, because it may assist theorists determine between the assorted unified theories on the desk. “It could be a essentially new…