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Posted by windbag on March 5, 2008, 9:44 pm
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David Williams wrote:
> -> Antimatter looks and acts just like regular matter. It clumps, forms
> -> stars and all the other stuff we can see. A cluster of galaxies made of
> -> antimatter looks just like galaxies made of regular matter. The only
> -> way you could tell is loose gas between an antimatter cluster and a
> -> cluster of matter galaxies touching and annihilating. We don't see
> -> that, maybe it's too weak or just that antimatter for some reason is
> -> rare.
>
> Let's not get confused between theory and observation. According to
> theory, antimatter should behave just like regular matter. But no
> observations have been made to confirm or deny that theory. Only
> microscopic amounts of antimatter have been made, far too small to see
> whether it clumps together under its own gravity, and so on. When I was
> a kid, various kinds of "parity" were thought to be universally
> conserved. Later observations showed this to be wrong. The idea that
> matter and antimatter behave identically is just another kind of
> parity, and whether it is truly conserved remains to be determined by
> observation.
>
> The fact that antimatter seems to be much less common in the universe
> than regular matter suggests that maybe they are *not* identical...
>
> -> > Nope. Dark matter has to be something else, or maybe nothing at all.
> -> >
>
> -> It's probably a real substance, but significantly different than what we
> -> see everyday on Earth.
>
> I'm not sure about the "probably".
>
> dow
Dark Matter may eventually be discarded as a model, if other
explanations arise to cover certain observations.
As another model, how many matter/anti-matter interactions would still
arise in a universe the age of our own; given equal starting amounts
of both? After an initial period of heavy mutual annihilation,
wouldn't the two types eventually become essentially segegated by
distance?
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