• Question: What's the smallest thing in the universe?

    Asked by anon-267369 on 16 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Andreas Korn

      Andreas Korn answered on 16 Nov 2020:

      As far as we know the smallest building blocks in the universe are elementary particles, like the electron. We now know that there are quite a few of them.
      We know of three electron like particles, the electron, the muon and the tau lepton. Six particles we call quarks and three types of neutrinos.
      We don’t really know if they have a real size or are themselves made of smaller particles again. Down to a size of 10^-18 meters they appear not to be.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 17 Nov 2020:

      I think that particles called neutrinos are probably the smallest things we know of, but we might discover smaller things in the future! Neutrinos are around 10 billion, billion, billion times smaller than a grain of sand according to our current estimates.

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