It is not some weird, “going to destroy the universe because one particle of it comes into existenceâ€? stuff. Pamela Gay: Well, antimatter does not have negative mass. So Pamela, what is – or should I say, what isn’t – antimatter?ĭr. We’ve gotten so many questions from listeners in just the last week about antimatter that our show had just been chosen for it. So many threads come together at the same time driving the decision for us. Just like the socks in your dryer, we may never discover where it all went.Fraser Cain: Sometimes, we don’t get to decide what our show’s about. If you were hoping there are antimatter lurking out there, hoarding all that precious future energy, I'm sorry to say, but astronomers have looked and they haven't found it. If that was the case, then antimatter galaxies might be able to repel particles of regular matter, preventing the annihilation, and the detection. Physicists at CERN have been generating antimatter particles, and trying to detect if they're falling downward or up. An atom of antihydrogen might actually fall upwards, accelerating away from the center of the Earth. It's possible that antimatter has antigravity. Matter and antimatter galaxies would be attracted to each other, encouraging annihilation.īut scientists don't actually know this definitively yet. Scientists think that antimatter, like regular matter, has regular gravity. There's one open question about antimatter that might make this a deeper mystery. A normally matter supernova generates fast moving neutrinos, while an antimatter supernova would generate a different collection of particles.
The ALPHA experiment, one of five experiments that are studying antimatter at CERN Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERNīut even those would be detectable by the supernova explosions within them. They would be blasting out radiation from all the annihilations from all the regular matter gas, dust, stars and planets wandering into an antimatter minefield. If these galaxies were out there, we'd see them interacting with the regular matter surrounding them. As long as there wasn't any matter to interact with.Īnd that's the problem. Now, back to the original question, could you have an entire galaxy made up of antimatter? In theory, yes, it would behave just like a regular galaxy. This stuff can't get very far without hitting anything and detonating. This antimatter is detectable because it's constantly crashing into the gas, dust, planets and stars that make up the Milky Way. In fact, astronomers have detected vast clouds of antimatter in our own Milky Way, generated largely by black holes and neutron stars grinding up their binary companions.īut our galaxy is mostly made up of regular matter. For example, when a neutron star or black hole consumes a star, it can spew out particles of antimatter. We can make antimatter in the laboratory with particle accelerators, and there are natural sources of the stuff.
It turns out this reversal of charge causes regular matter and antimatter to annihilate when they make contact, converting all their mass into pure energy when they come together. Antielectrons have a positive charge, antihydrogen is made up of an antiproton and a positron (instead of a proton and an electron). Atoms have same atomic mass and the exact same properties, it's just that all the charges are reversed. If those antimatter galaxies are out there, could we detect them and communicate with those aliens?Īntimatter is just like matter in almost every way. You, and everything you know is just a mathematical remainder, left over from the great division of the Universe's first day.īut is it possible that the antimatter didn't actually go anywhere? That it's all still there in the Universe, floating in galaxies of antimatter, made up of antimatter stars, surrounded by antimatter planets, filled with antimatter aliens?Īliens who are friendly and wonderful in every way, except if we hugged, we'd annihilate and detonate with the energy of gigatons of TNT.
0 kommentar(er)
