All the stars in the world are made of ordinary matter. Astronomers have not ruled out the possibility that some antimatter could be made.
Antimatter happens to be the oppositely charged alter ego of typical matter. Electrons , for example , possess antimatter twins, called positrons. Positrons possess positive charge where electrons have negative charge. Scientists feel that the universe was created with equal parts matter and antimatter. Today the cosmos seems to have almost no antimatter.
Recently, space station data has put doubt on this concept of a practically antimatter universe. One instrument might have observed in space bits of antihelium atoms. These facts have to be confirmed. If they were, that antimatter could have been squandered by antimatter stars. That is antistars.
Some researchers were fascinated by the thought and went in search of potential antistars. The team knew that matter and antimatter when they meet annihilate one another. That may happen if normal matter falls onto an antistar from interstellar space. This particle annihilation type gives off gamma rays with certain wavelengths. The team utilized data from the Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope to look for those wavelengths. They found them.
14 points in the sky provided the gamma rays anticipated from matter-antimatter annihilation events. Those spots didn’t look like other recognized gamma ray sources, like black holes or spinning neutron stars. That was yet more proof that the sources could be antistars. On the 20th of April scientists reported their discovery in the journal Physical Review D.
Rare — or possibly hiding?
The scientists then estimated the number of antistars might exist near our solar system. Those estimations depended on the place antistars would likely be discovered more than likely in case they existed truly.
Any disk in our universe will be surrounded by a great quantity of ordinary matter. That could result in them to create a great deal of gamma rays. They ought to, therefore, be simple to spot. The researchers discovered only fourteen candidates however.
What this means is antistars tend to be extremely rare. Just how rare is the fact that? For every 400,000 regular stars, maybe just one antistar might be present.
Nonetheless, antistars might be present beyond the disk of the Milky Way. They might have much much less opportunity to interact with regular matter there. In this more confined atmosphere, they ought to also produce a lesser amount of gamma rays. That could cause them to become tougher to find. However , in such a scenario, of all the 10 regular stars, one antistar might lurk.
Nevertheless, antistars are just a flimsy idea. As a matter of fact, proving that a thing is an antistar is nearly impossible. Why? Simon Dupourque explains that antistars ought to appear practically the same as regular stars. He’s a physicist in the town of Toulouse, France. He has been employed at the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology.
“It’s a lot easier to prove the candidates discovered so far aren’t antistars,” he said. Scientists may see how gamma rays change with time from the candidates. These modifications could give us a concept of if these objects are rotating neutron stars or not. Some other radiation coming coming from the items may in fact point to them being black holes.
“If antistars were available, it will be a huge blow to our knowledge of the universe,” he said. So concludes Pierre Salati, who wasn’t associated with the project. This astrophysicist is employed in France at Annecy-le-Vieux Laboratory of Theoretical Physics. In case we observed antistars, it might suggest that not all of the antimatter was lost in the universe. Some might have made it through remote areas of space instead.
However antistars couldn’t conceivably replace all of the insufficient antimatter in the universe. At any rate that’s what Julian Heeck considers. He had been a physicist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville but didn’t take part in the research. “But then , you’d still have to have an explanation for the reason why matter in general dominates over antimatter,” he added.
