Bosons

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Bosons are elementary particles that carry forces and there are four forces that control the nucleus of an atom, gravity, and electromagnetism.

The strong nuclear force is controlled by the gluon. The gluons, make the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons "stick" together. This is a massless particle, and it can be massless because it is a force carrier, and is not actually made up of matter. It also does not have an electrical charge. Below there is a scale model of the a proton, the two red particles are up quarks and the blue particle is a down quark. The smaller purple particles are the gluons that hold the quarks together.



The weak nuclear force is made up of the W+, W-, and Z bosons.

The W- is an extremely heavy particle weighing in at 80.398GeV, and thats heavier then the entire nucleus of an iron atom! It exists during a nuclear decay and only lives for 10^-25 seconds, or .0000000000000000000000001 seconds. Its charge is -1, however, W- does have an anti-particle counter part, W+, which is exactly the same but the charge is 1.

The Z boson is a little bit heavier the the W- and W+ bosons, weighing in at 91GeV, and the only other difference is that it has a charge of 0.

The electromagnetic force is carried by the photon, a massless, charge-less particle. It carries the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just light. It is the fastest known thing in the entire universe, traveling 186,000 miles per second!! It also travels in a wave and 1012 photons travel through a pinhead every second.

The last force carrier carries the gravitational force, and is aptly named the graviton. This is only a theoretical particle and has never been observed before. It is massless and has no charge. In order to prove this particle exists, physicists must link the particle to the curvature of the space-time continuum and calculate the exerted gravitational force.