Milky Way’s Antimatter Star Cluster

in #science4 years ago

Our Universe has much more matter than antimatter. Yet, there could be areas where antimatter rules with antistars and antiplanets.


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Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

We still aren’t sure why our Universe is made majorly from matter rather than antimatter. Some physicists think that there could still exist stars or even whole galaxies made from antimatter. Such antistars could continuously eject antimatter into their surrounding space and we could perhaps even detect them as a small fraction of high-energy cosmic rays that hit the Earth.

It is no secret that antimatter is essentially just matter. Practically every particle has its antiparticle twin that is its mirror image. It has the same mass, spin, and everything except for its electrical charge which is reversed. For example, a positron – an antielectron – carries a positive electric charge.

Our models of physics seem to suggest that each particle should have its mirror twin – an antiparticle. But when we look around, all we see is just regular old matter. Our world is made from matter, the whole Solar system is made from matter and so is its surroundings. It seems like the whole Universe is made essentially just from matter. We only know of antimatter because of two places. We can make it ourselves in the most powerful of particle accelerators and we can also detect it among cosmic ray particles. And these particles usually come from the most energetic events in the Universe such as supernovae explosions or stellar collisions.

It seems that the imbalance between matter and antimatter happened because of something that took place in the very earliest moments of the Universe’s existence. But we don’t know of the mechanism that caused it. But that doesn’t mean all the antimatter has just vanished. There could be large chunks or even areas of antimatter left in the Universe.

These antimatter regions did not necessarily just vanish in the spectacular flames of annihilation that happens when regular matter meets antimatter. It could work essentially the same way the rest of the Universe works. Antistars would burn antihydrogen into antihelium and the antifusion would heat up their antiplanets. The physics would stay the same just the charge would be reversed.

Most experts do doubt that whole antigalaxies exist near the Milky Way as if such an object hit a galaxy made from normal matter (as galaxies sometimes tend to do) the explosions would be so gigantic we would definitely notice it. But smaller antimatter objects are much more possible. Such as star clusters.

A team of physicists recently calculated what it would look like if about one out of every 150 star clusters that we have in our galaxy was an antimatter star cluster. And unless it would go through the galactic disk or even the center of the Milky Way it could potentially exist for a long time. Antistars would live their antilives and shine just as much as regular stars.

But, all the stellar antiactivity would fill the surrounding areas with a large number of antiparticles. In such a case antiparticles that hit the Earth could be coming from the stellar anticlusters and we could perhaps track them down.

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