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Registered Member #543
Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992
US scientists get glimpse of antihelium
Heaviest particles of antimatter seen in a lab survive for about 10 billionths of a second before crashing into collider's detector
Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk Sunday 24 April 2011 17.59 BST
They were gone as soon as they appeared, but for a fleeting moment they were the heaviest particles of antimatter a laboratory has seen.
Scientists in the US produced a clutch of antihelium particles, the antimatter equivalents of the helium nucleus, after smashing gold ions together nearly 1bn times at close to the speed of light.
The discovery of antihelium at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven national laboratory in New York will aid the search for exotic phenomena in the distant universe, including antimatter versions of stars and even galaxies.
Antimatter looks and behaves like normal matter but has one crucial difference: particles of antimatter have an equal and opposite charge to those that make up the world around us. When antimatter meets matter, the two annihilate one another, leaving nothing but a burst of energy.
Researchers at the US laboratory recorded 18 antihelium particles that survived for about 10 billionths of a second before they crashed into the collider's detector and vanished in the tiniest of fireballs.
"Antihelium is stable, so if it doesn't encounter anything it will survive forever," said Aihong Tang, a physicist at the laboratory. "Unless there is a major breakthrough in accelerator technology, this will be the heaviest antimatter made for decades to come."
Antihelium is the heaviest breed of antimatter created by scientists, with each particle is roughly 10 million billion times lighter than a grain of sand. The next heaviest that is stable is antilithium, but this is so rare the Brookhaven collider would have to run for thousands of years to detect just one particle.
Antimatter is central to one of the greatest mysteries of our existence. Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang and should have destroyed each other in one enormous cosmic explosion. But for reasons unknown, only normal matter seems to have survived to make up all we know in the visible universe.
Particles of antimatter were first discovered in 1932 when a US researcher found antielectrons, or positrons, among the debris of cosmic ray collisions. Cosmic rays are highly charged streams of particles that can span vast stretches of space.
Paul Dirac, the British physicist who predicted antimatter, speculated that some regions of the universe might be home to entire galaxies made of antimatter.
The latest research, published in the journal Nature, is a benchmark for space-based experiments that will hunt for antimatter elsewhere in the universe. Next week, the penultimate mission of the space shuttle will deliver a $2bn instrument called the alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS) to the International Space Station. From there, it will scour space for signs of heavenly bodies made from antimatter.
"Collisions among cosmic rays near Earth can produce antimatter, but the odds of these collisions producing an intact antihelium nucleus are so vanishingly small that finding even one would strongly suggest that it had drifted to Earth from a distant region of the universe dominated by antimatter," said Hans Georg Ritter at the University of California, Berkeley.
"Antimatter doesn't look any different from ordinary matter, but AMS finding just one antihelium nucleus would suggest that some of the galaxies we see are antimatter galaxies."
Registered Member #3429
Joined: Sun Nov 21 2010, 02:04AM
Location: Minnesota, USA
Posts: 288
Proud Mary wrote ...
"Antimatter doesn't look any different from ordinary matter, but AMS finding just one antihelium nucleus would suggest that some of the galaxies we see are antimatter galaxies."
Maybe antihelium and antihydrogen (and anti-whatever) actually make up what scientists call "dark matter". They calculated that there is not enough regular matter in the universe for it to behave the way it does, and so they came up with this ridiculous notion of this stuff called dark matter (because they don't know what it actually is, or even if dark matter actually exists). So, it seems reasonable to me that the stuff they are calling dark matter is actually forms of antimatter. Thoughts?
BTW - Cosmology is not one of my stronger subjects, so please be kind to me if my comments are ludicrous!
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
I too find it amazing that so called 'reputable scientists' have to 'invent' something for which there is absolutely no evidence, and then say that 90% of everything in the universe is made of this 'invisible, undetactable, imaginary. (King's new clothes) stuff, because they don't want to accept that the 'standard model' is wrong.
EDIT: Apparently, anti-matter travels backwards through time, so most anti-matter would 'now' exist 'before' the Big Bang. (maybe some-one more knowledgable than me could elucidate?)
Registered Member #3832
Joined: Thu Apr 14 2011, 11:57PM
Location: Downtown Chicago, IL
Posts: 37
I'm sorry- I just don't feel I should be thinking about this. It goes in that category of things that if you think about them you can't stop for hours and your head just starts to hurt, and your afraid that if you think enough you'll finally figure out the universe and instantly be vaporized for possessing such knowledge.
Registered Member #3429
Joined: Sun Nov 21 2010, 02:04AM
Location: Minnesota, USA
Posts: 288
steve516 wrote ...
I'm sorry- I just don't feel I should be thinking about this. It goes in that category of things that if you think about them you can't stop for hours and your head just starts to hurt, and your afraid that if you think enough you'll finally figure out the universe and instantly be vaporized for possessing such knowledge.
My $0.02.
DAMN! That's exactly what I've been thinking for a long time! So, if more than one person has thought this, then there might be some tru
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
Proud Mary wrote ...
Ash Small wrote ...
I too find it amazing that so called 'reputable scientists' have to 'invent' something for which there is absolutely no evidence
Nul points!
The evidence produced by analysis of gravitational lensing is very good indeed.
From Wikipedea:
"As important as dark matter is believed to be in the cosmos, direct evidence of its existence and a concrete understanding of its nature have remained elusive. Though the theory of dark matter remains the most widely accepted theory to explain the anomalies in observed galactic rotation, some alternative theoretical approaches have been developed which broadly fall into the categories of modified gravitational laws, and quantum gravitational laws."
and....
"These results suggest that either Newtonian gravity does not apply universally or that, conservatively, upwards of 50% of the mass of galaxies was contained in the relatively dark galactic halo."
and, on the subject of lensing,
"Another galaxy cluster, known as the Train Wreck Cluster/Abell 520, seems to have its dark matter completely separated from both the galaxies and the gas in that cluster, which presents some problems for theoretical models"
Registered Member #543
Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992
Ash Small wrote ...
Proud Mary wrote ...
Ash Small wrote ...
I too find it amazing that so called 'reputable scientists' have to 'invent' something for which there is absolutely no evidence
Nul points!
The evidence produced by analysis of gravitational lensing is very good indeed.
From Wikipedea:
"As important as dark matter is believed to be in the cosmos, direct evidence of its existence and a concrete understanding of its nature have remained elusive. Though the theory of dark matter remains the most widely accepted theory to explain the anomalies in observed galactic rotation, some alternative theoretical approaches have been developed which broadly fall into the categories of modified gravitational laws, and quantum gravitational laws."
and....
"These results suggest that either Newtonian gravity does not apply universally or that, conservatively, upwards of 50% of the mass of galaxies was contained in the relatively dark galactic halo."
I think the jury is still out on this one.
A quote from Wikipedia seems to me to fall well short of supporting your view that scientists who accept the Dark Matter hypothesis are somehow not 'reputable.'
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
Proud Mary wrote ...
A quote from Wikipedia seems to me to fall well short of supporting your view that scientists who accept the Dark Matter hypothesis are somehow not 'reputable.'
Well, I'll keep an open mind until conclusive proof emerges either way.
It seems to me more probable that gravity isn't uniform. We don't even understand 'why' matter has 'mass' (without this property called 'mass', everything can be explained in terms of 'waves'.....then there is the problem of wave/particle duality of things with no mass, ie photons. There is a lot that we don't know, so why believe that Newton (or Einstein) was right when observation suggests otherwise?)
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Ash Small wrote ...
I too find it amazing that so called 'reputable scientists' have to 'invent' something for which there is absolutely no evidence, and then say that 90% of everything in the universe is made of this 'invisible, undetactable, imaginary. (King's new clothes) stuff, because they don't want to accept that the 'standard model' is wrong.
If even the world's smartest scientists have no idea what they are talking about, what is the point of us discussing it? It's just piling more drivel on top of officially sanctioned drivel.
One still-unsolved mystery is: Why did the Big Bang not create antimatter and matter in equal quantities? Or if it did, where did the anti-stuff go? There is a great excess of the regular type of matter, out of which the entire visible universe seems to be made, as there is no evidence of it violently annihilating itself. This implies some sort of asymmetry that theoretical physicists seem to find quite annoying.
I personally think the Big Bang theory is just the old "cosmic egg" creation myth in a lab coat.
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US scientists get glimpse of antihelium
