![]() Including our solar system, where those antiparticles would appear as just another part of the cosmic ray gang. Or dying in fantastic supernova explosions.Īll those processes would release tons of antiparticles, sending them flowing out of the anti-cluster and into the nearby volume of the universe, including the Milky Way. Or having huge flare and coronal mass ejection events. Things like emitting a constant stream of particles. Instead, the anti-stars in the anti-cluster would go about their normal lives, doing normal star-like things. Since the anti-cluster would just be made of stars, and stars don't take up a lot of volume, there aren't a lot of opportunities for big booms. Unless the globular cluster plunged right through the disk of the Milky Way, it wouldn't really blow up. They asked a simple question: what would happen? The Milky Way itself has a retinue of about 150 of them.Īnd some of them may be made of anti-stars.Ī team of theoretical astrophysicists calculated what would happen if one of the globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way was actually an anti-cluster, as reported in a paper recently appearing in the preprint journal arXiv. They just sort of hang around, orbiting lamely around their larger, more active cousins, remnants of a bygone and largely forgotten era. They are also relatively free of gas and dust - all the fuel you need to make new stars. They are thought to be incredibly old, as they are not forming new stars in the present epoch, and are instead filled with small, red, aged populations. Globular clusters are small, dense clumps of fewer than a million stars orbiting larger galaxies. You can have anti-dust, anti-stars fueled by anti-fusion, anti-planets with anti-people drinking refreshing anti-glasses of anti-water, the works.Īstronomers don't suspect that there are entire anti-galaxies floating around out there, because their interactions with normal matter (say, when two galaxies collide) would release quite a bit of energy - enough for us to notice by now. So 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. Our theories of fundamental physics point to a special kind of symmetry between matter and antimatter - they mirror each other almost perfectly.
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