There is a problem in the scientific community that hasn’t been solved, and if we are quite honest, it is kind of disturbing to think about.

To put it simply, we shouldn’t exist.

Not just any one of us individually, or even humanity in general, but anything. There should be nothing but energy in the universe.

This is because at the Big Bang, models show that matter and antimatter should have been formed in equal quantities. When matter and antimatter interact, however, they annihilate, which turns them into energy. The math is simple, 1-1=0, and that is how much matter should exist.

A group of researchers has published a study in the journal Nature, however, that has a theory on why there is matter in the universe at all, and it involves neutrinos.

Neutrinos are tiny particles that are so small that they are often called ghost particles. While you’ve never seen one, you have interacted with them. In fact, an estimated 100 trillion neutrinos fly through us every second.

They are so small that they pass easily through the space between the atoms in our body, no harm done.

As if that weren’t weird enough, scientists have found that there are actually three types of neutrinos, and each type is called a flavor.

They are electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. Each neutrino, however, can change flavor, seemingly spontaneously, in a process dubbed neutrino oscillations.

Then there is the fact that neutrinos have a tiny bit of mass that is formed by the combination of their mass states. The mass states do not line up with the flavors, which is weird on its own, but instead, each of the three flavors can be a mix of the three mass states.

Oh, and they can be in a normal ordering or an inverted ordering. Two of the mass states available are light states, and one is heavy when it is a normal-ordered neutrino. When it is inverted, there are two heavy and one light.

Research has shown that in the normal-mass state ordering neutrinos, it is more likely that a muon neutrino will oscillate to an electron neutrino. In an inverted mass state neutrino, the opposite is true.

Two experiments were done based on these facts, and they found that while there is no preference for mass ordering, assuming inverted mass ordering is correct, it may explain why the universe has matter.

The study makes it clear that their theory in itself is not proof. Additional research is needed to learn more about how neutrinos truly influence the matter-antimatter asymmetry. If they are right, however, it may explain that asymmetry and therefore answer the question of why anything exists at all.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read a story that reveals Earth’s priciest precious metal isn’t gold or platinum and costs over $10,000 an ounce!