12/28/2023 0 Comments Antimatter starsSo you can form anti-hydrogen, anti-helium, and anti-all-the-other-elements. Remember that the only difference between antimatter and matter is their charge - all other operations of physics remain exactly the same. Over the course of billions of years, those clumps of antimatter could have assembled together and grown larger. Sure, when matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate each other in a flash of energy, and that would've caused some headaches in the early universe, but if the antimatter clumps made it through that trial, they would've been home free. Those clumps, if they survived long enough, would grow up in relative isolation. It's totally possible that the early universe may have left large clumps of antimatter alone, floating here and there throughout the universe. It wouldn't take much, just a one part per billion imbalance, but it would be enough for normal matter to come to dominate essentially the entire universe, eventually forming stars and galaxies and even you and me.īut whatever that process was - and I should mention that the detailed physics of that antimatter-killing mechanism in the early universe are currently beyond known physics, so there's a lot up in the air here - it may not have been entirely perfect. But then something happened something caused more matter to be produced than antimatter. Presumably in the good old days (and I'm talking when the universe was less than a second old here), matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts. We're not exactly sure what did it, but something went off balance in the young cosmos. The universe's dark secret: Where did all the antimatter go? Those particles come from ultra-powerful processes in the universe, like supernovae and colliding stars, and so the same physics applies.īut why is antimatter so rare? If matter and antimatter are so perfectly balanced, what happened to all the anti-stuff? The answer lies somewhere in the early universe. Cosmic rays aren't really rays but rather are streams of high-energy particles streaking in from across the cosmos and hitting our atmosphere. One is inside our ultra-powerful particle colliders: When we turn them on and blow up some subatomic stuff, jets of both normal and antimatter pop out. There are only two places where antimatter exists. Earth is made of normal matter, the solar system is made of normal matter, the dust between galaxies is made of normal matter it looks like the whole universe is entirely composed of normal matter. But when we look around, we don't see any antimatter. For every particle of matter in the universe, there ought to be a particle of antimatter. I'm not a physicist, so be gentle with me.Our theories of fundamental physics point to a special kind of symmetry between matter and antimatter - they mirror each other almost perfectly. Or would the low mass of these particles (and the weak interaction of neutrinos) mean that the black hole would disappear in a huge nova? I was wondering whether the black hole would remain, with its mass made up entirely of the products of annihilation, sort of a photon / neutrino black hole. Bearing in mind there is no matter present outside the event horizon, and the star hits the black hole at one of its poles (so the ergosphere would be minimal), would the black hole be annihilated by the antimatter? If so, would the photons, neutrinos and whatever other particles are formed be able to escape the event horizon? I'm guessing the black hole is much smaller than the antimatter star, so would end up in the core very quickly. There's no time for them to orbit around each other in a death waltz. Just by chance, a rogue antimatter star of exactly the mass slams into the black hole at one of its poles. It is, amazingly, sitting in an area of space that is a perfect vacuum. Imagine a black hole, about 10 solar masses. This is a bit hypothetical obviously as I doubt the conditions for this scenario would ever occur in the real universe.
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