Once enough time has passed, however, all of the matter around will end up being sucked into black holes.
A few sources of asymmetry have already been found, but not enough to account for all the matter around.
Now that Mr. Dodd is chairman of the Rules Committee, he has said he will hold hearings on the matter around the country.
But, worry not, the fireballs are nothing dangerous - they last for a mere 100,000 billion billionths of a second and do not seem to have much impact on the matter around them.
House officials confirmed that Representative A was Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who has publicly acknowledged that he spoke with Ms. Waters about the matter around that time, and that he warned her not to get involved.
Within the matter around us, particles called quarks clump together in twos or threes, each group cloaked in a cloud of particles called gluons.
Moreover, measurements from the cosmic microwave background suggest that there must be at least three times as much energy in empty space as can be accounted for all the matter around galaxies, including dark matter.
As data comes in from Japan's latest X-ray satellite, astronomers around the world hope to learn about the evolution of the largest structures in the cosmos, the behavior of black holes and the matter around them, and the internal structure of neutron stars.
"I like listening to all the matter around me vibrating," Feather, 58, said in a phone interview after the award ceremony at the Walters Art Museum.
