Gluon

Gluons are what hold quarks together to make bigger particles^[1] called hadrons. Gluons carry the strong force between other quarks, so it is considered a force carrying particle. Photons do the same thing, but for the electromagnetic force. Also, like photons, gluons are spin-1 particles, and when a particle has spin-1 it is considered a boson.

Gluons are hard to study because although they exist in nature all the time, they are so small and require so much energy to break them away from quarks (about 2 trillion degrees) that scientists have only been able to find more about them from particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Murray Gell-Mann (though it might have actually been Edward Teller^[a]) gave them this name in 1962 for being similar to an adhesive or glue that keeps the nucleus together. Together with the quarks, these particles were called partons by Richard Feynman.

1. ↑ Cox, Brian; Cohen, Andrew (2011). Wonders of the Universe. HarperCollins. p. 109. ISBN 9780007395828.
2. ↑ Gell-Mann, Murray (1997). "Feynman's parton" (Interview). No. 131. Interviewed by Geoffrey West.