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Have you heard of photons and gluons? Because they are the smallest components of the atom – formed by pure energy, they don’t even have mass. Photons are the particles of light baptized by Einstein, while gluons are called messenger particles, for binding quarks (another type of subatomic particle) to the interior of protons and neutrons.
Among the particles that have some mass, the smallest is the neutrino. “It can be 4 x 10-33 grams,” says physicist Cláudio Furukawa, from USP. That’s equivalent to a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a gram—and it’s a mass 100 million times smaller than that of the proton, which is 1.67 x 10-24 grams. To get an idea of what this means, if the proton were the size of a marble, the atom would be the equivalent of a football stadium.
It would be necessary to line up 50 million of these microscopic Maracanãs to form a line of just 1 centimeter! Unlike protons, neutrinos are not like the bricks that make up matter – they are particles ejected by atoms from the interior of stars like the Sun. Believe me: billions and billions of them pass through your body right now, as you read this magazine .