One of the ways they might be produced is when Dark Matter particles collide with each other and annihilate. Anti-protons have more mass, so are harder to produce¹, but are created quite often at particle colliders like those at CERN.īut where would anti-protons in space come from, and what might they tell us? Positrons, which are the antiparticle of the electron, are even produced naturally in some radioactive decays, and are used routinely in medicine. This is important and interesting, because the universe seems to be made mostly of matter not antimatter.Īntiparticles do exist, and can be created quite easily if you have enough energy. Combined with other measurements that AMS-02 can make, this means it can tell the difference between matter and antimatter. Positively charged particles will curve in the opposite direction to negatively charged particles. AMS-02 has a magnetic field, and the way electrically charged particles curve in this field allows their electric charge to be measured. AMS-02 is the most sensitive particle detector ever deployed in space, and is making those measurements now.Īpart from “being in space”, an important feature of AMS-02 is the “spectrometer” aspect. However, that means if you want to get good measurements of them, you have to go above the atmosphere. Most get stopped by our friendly atmosphere, which is a good thing from our point of view. High-energy particles arrive at the Earth continually. Let’s start, though, with the Antimatter Spectrometer ( AMS-02), a particle detector installed on the International Space Station. A couple of weeks ago Michael Winn, from the LHCb experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, gave another example of how this can work. One of the satisfying and sometimes wonderful things about science is the way information from very different experiments can combine to tell us something new.
Which in turn may help a satellite on the International Space Station find evidence for Dark Matter. So far, none of those conditions has been found to account for the imbalance between matter and antimatter, so the subject remains a busy topic of research.A new measurement at CERN tells us something about the way particles travel through interstellar space. And finally, he said there must be some difference between matter and antimatter. Second, he said that the universe must have cooled in a certain way in the moments after the Big Bang. Sakharov said that protons must decay, but so slowly that it’s almost impossible to detect. In a paper published 50 years ago, he outlined conditions that could create the imbalance. The Russian physicist had helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but turned away from weapons work. One of the first scientists to consider that imbalance was Andrei Sakharov. For every billion pairs of matter and antimatter particles, there was one extra particle of matter. But in the first tiny fraction of a second, something changed that balance. Most theories say the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So there could be a whole galaxy made of antimatter out there and our telescopes wouldn’t see it any differently from a galaxy of normal matter. The only difference is electric charge, which is opposite for the two forms of matter. Any time matter and antimatter meet, they cancel each other out in a blaze of energy.Īntimatter is identical to normal matter in almost every way. Fictional starships notwithstanding, there’s not much antimatter in the universe.
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