![]() 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |