"Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found" I found this pretty interesting

[240sxDann]

I thought this was pretty interesting. Input?

Antimatter, which annihilates matter upon contact, seems to be rare in the universe. Still, for decades, scientists had clues that a vast cloud of antimatter lurked in space, but they did not know where it came from.

The mysterious source of this antimatter has now been discovered — stars getting ripped apart by neutron stars and black holes.

While antimatter propulsion systems are so far the stuff of science fiction, antimatter is very real.

What it is

All elementary particles, such as protons and electrons, have antimatter counterparts with the same mass but the opposite charge. For instance, the antimatter opposite of an electron, known as a positron, is positively charged.

When a particle meets its antiparticle, they destroy each other, releasing a burst of energy such as gamma rays. In 1978, gamma ray detectors flown on balloons detected a type of gamma ray emerging from space that is known to be emitted when electrons collide with positrons — meaning there was antimatter in space.

"It was quite a surprise back then to discover part of the universe was made of antimatter," researcher Gerry Skinner, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

These gamma rays apparently came from a cloud of antimatter roughly 10,000 light-years across surrounding our galaxy's core. This giant cloud shines brightly with gamma rays, with about the energy of 10,000 suns.

What exactly generated the antimatter was a mystery for the following decades. Suspects have included everything from exploding stars to dark matter.

Now, an international research team looking over four years of data from the European Space Agency's International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) satellite has pinpointed the apparent culprits. Their new findings suggest these positrons originate mainly from stars getting devoured by black holes and neutron stars.

As a black hole or neutron star destroys a star, tremendous amounts of radiation are released. Just as electrons and positrons emit the tell-tale gamma rays upon annihilation, so too can gamma rays combine to form electrons and positrons, providing the mechanism for the creation of the antimatter cloud, scientists think.

Billions and billions

The researchers calculate that a relatively ordinary star getting torn apart by a black hole or neutron star orbiting around it — a so-called "low mass X-ray binary" — could spew on the order of one hundred thousand billion billion billion billion positrons (a 1 followed by 41 zeroes) per second. These could account for a great deal of the antimatter that scientists have inferred, reducing or potentially eliminating the need for exotic explanations such as ones involving dark matter.

"Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all the antimatter is coming from X-ray binaries," said researcher Georg Weidenspointner of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Now that they have witnessed the death of antimatter, the scientists hope to see its birth.

"It would be interesting if black holes produced more matter than neutron stars, or vice versa, although it's too early to say one way or the other right now," Skinner explained. "It can be surprisingly hard to tell the difference between an X-ray binaries that hold black holes and neutron stars."

Weidenspointner, Skinner and their colleagues, detailed their findings in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature.

[Nick 95 6sp]

I keep thinking that I've read pretty much the same ideas for a long time already, but there's probably some subtle or not so subtle point I'm not comprehending that makes this a new discovery, since Nature is a highly reputable journal.

The idea has been widely published for a long time that many, probably even most, galaxies have black holes in their cores, which naturally would be devouring anything they can grab with their intense gravity, and then of course that results in emmission of huge energy levels, gamma rays, electron/positron, antimatter spewing out of that area.

[~Brian~]

I was reading the same article on Yahoo this morning. Pretty cool stuff.

[MPowerKai]

We have antimatter already, we have about half a gram and we it's all man made.

[240sxDann]

no shiz? thats nuts. imagine the destruction that could become of that. some things just seem like they shouldn't be messed with, for the sake of humanity.

[james_ls]

Yeah good game guys.

Everyone thought nuclear arms were going to take us out...

Think twice...

[240sxDann]

ladies and gentlemen, this could very well be the beginning of the end. You know as well as I do that we, as Americans, tend to go WAY overboard with everything, ESPECIALLY weaponry. This could be bad...

[RSX Type-Slow]

pretty interesting but will be a long time until we can create or capture this immense energy and use it for anything

[DropTopChevy]

Originally Posted by RSX Type-Slow

pretty interesting but will be a long time until we can create or capture this immense energy and use it for anything

Or screw it up.

[where'smyturbo?]

i wonder how it would feel, being on earth, if a black hole consumed us.

[ITSTOCK]

I thought that we already knew where antimatter came from? I also though that we already knew how to create antimatter?

I must be missing something. I remember this stuff from High School, so it's got to be at least 4 years now.

[ITSTOCK]

Originally Posted by where'smyturbo?

i wonder how it would feel, being on earth, if a black hole consumed us.

You would literally incinerate/disappear so fast that you wouldn't know what happened....or you wouldn't be "there' to even consider what just happened.

[Scapegoat]

Originally Posted by where'smyturbo?

i wonder how it would feel, being on earth, if a black hole consumed us.

depends on how close we are. I'd assume we'd be sucked in and killed as soon as we were close enough... now the earth on the other hand would probably start to rip apart and most of us would be killed during that process

[mattcosta7]

There's a lab that's actually created miniature non-sustainable black holes.

Black Hole In Big Apple

Updated:11:07, Thursday March 17, 2005
Don't panic but a black hole is far nearer than you may think.
Unitil now it would have taken a very long trip into outer space to see one but now scientists have created their very own black hole in a laboratory in New York

But thankfully it was not the sort that could consume the Earth

It lasted for a tiny amount of time, a staggering 10 million billion billionths of a second.

The heat generated was 300 million times the temperature on the surface of the Sun.

Scientists used a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to shoot two beams of gold nuclei at each other at the speed of light.

The intense heat of the collision breaks down the nuclei into quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of all normal matter.

These particles then formed a ball of plasma which can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision, so creating a black hole.

Ed Shuryak, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York said: "It's very useful in that it will inspire thinking in that direction.

"But it's going to be another thng to see if it produces any fruit."

They didn't destroy anything, but I wonder how long until that's a problem.

[240sxDann]

Originally Posted by mattcosta7

There's a lab that's actually created miniature non-sustainable black holes.



They didn't destroy anything, but I wonder how long until that's a problem.

see the thing is, I honestly believe all the things we hear about, are probably things that were discovered in like 1965, and are already perfected, but they want to let the public know a very very very slight bit about it to spread fear or concern or whatever. The government has things in the deepest darkest hiding places that I'm sure we could never imagine.

[mattcosta7]

Originally Posted by 240sxDann

see the thing is, I honestly believe all the things we hear about, are probably things that were discovered in like 1965, and are already perfected, but they want to let the public know a very very very slight bit about it to spread fear or concern or whatever. The government has things in the deepest darkest hiding places that I'm sure we could never imagine.

To some extent I would be inclined to agree, but not just governmental structures, I'm sure independent labs who discover some of this stuff hide it very well until they see a viable means of using this technology.

I often have thought about taking a ride out to Brookhaven labs, just to see the facility. The project name that created that black hole is pretty awesome

I mean, who wouldn't want to be a piece of the "Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider" labs? http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/