The Mystery of The Missing Antimatter: Mirror Image Worlds in The Depths of Space?

The Mystery of Missing Antimatter: Mirror-Image Worlds in the Depths of Space?

By Mr Ghaz, March 11, 2011

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The Mystery of Missing Antimatter: Mirror-Image Worlds in the Depths of Space?

Antimatter may sound like something that was invented by a science fiction writer, but it does exist, although only for fleeting fractions of a second. Antimatter consists of antiparticles. They resemble such particles as electrons, neutrons, and protons – except that they have an opposite electric charge. Despite its short duration, antimatter poses some intriguing and important questions for physicists.

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The story begins in the early 1900’s, when scientists first started to explore the structure of atoms by smashing them at an extremely high speed. The atoms split into their component particles: the heavy protons and neutrons of the nucleus, and the smaller, lighter electrons that surround it.

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Because electrons carry a unit of negative electric charge, theorists maintained that there had to be another particle – which they called a position – with the same mass as the electron but an opposite electric charge. When they observed the position in 1932, physicists saw that when an electron and position met, they annihilated each other.

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As storms were made to collide at ever-higher speeds, more and more particles were discovered. Each seemed to have an equal and opposite antiparticle: antiprotons as well as protons, and antineutrons as well as neutrons. In the natural world, these particles sometimes form when a high-energy cosmic ray from the sun or another star strikes a particle of ordinary matter. But just as in the laboratory, any antiparticle created this way is short lived, in the instant that the opposites encounter each other, both are destroyed.

Preponderance of Matter

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According to the logic of science, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts in the early stages of the formation of the universe. But to date no one has been able to explain why our universe appears to consist almost exclusively of matter.

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Some theorists speculate that the universe as a whole does in fact contain equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that antimatter is concentrated in galaxies would produce light and other radiation in the same way that stars and galaxies in our universe do. Since the examination of radiation is, so far, the only method we have for studying distant galaxies, we are unable to determine whether or not they are made up of antimatter.

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No one, however, has yet been able to theorize a process by which separate islands of antimatter and matter might have been created in the first place. Why did the two types not annihilate each other? Were forces at play in the early stages of the universe that prevented this?

Image via Wikipedia

One thing is certain. If there are antimatter worlds somewhere in space, close encounters of any kind are strictly prohibited.