All that missing antimatter

[EightInchNails]

So I was reading through Hawking's A Brief History of Time (it's a surprisingly engrossing read; I'd definitely recommend it) and in the early sections it deals with the fundamentals of space, time, matter, and the basics of the laws of physics.

Whilst reading the section on antimatter and how the universe appeared to have more matter in it than antimatter, it occurred to me that antimatter by definition shouldn't be able to be detected by conventional means. How do we detect ordinary matter? By projecting particles towards them. This approach by definition shouldn't work with antimatter; as is well-established, matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact.

So how do you detect them instead? By their gravitational pull. Gravity is a universal law that applies to all matter - or antimatter - and so therefore any significantly large bodies of antimatter, such as anti-meteors, anti-planets or even anti-suns and anti-nebulae, should in theory be detectable by their gravitational pull but not directly observable.

So then I wondered, if they're out there, why haven't they been detected yet? Surely a non-detectable source of gravitational disturbance more or less equal to the current distribution of matter should be pretty noticeable? Fortunately Hawking provided the answer shortly after - we already have detected gravitational anomalies matching the description of the ones that I have described, and they have been attributed to a hypothetical exotic matter called dark matter.

Anyway, that's my speculation on the subject. I'm certainly no expert so feel free to iron out any scientific inaccuracies or inconsistencies that I may have overlooked.

[BTGBullseye]

Except that the mass of dark matter far exceeds that of the matter we can observe currently... Not a really good explanation IMO.

[Im_CIA]

21 hours ago, BTGBullseye said:

Except that the mass of dark matter far exceeds that of the matter we can observe currently... Not a really good explanation IMO.

>Bullseye

>Different avatar

So when is the Crystalline Entity coming to harvest this site, Mr. Lore?

[EightInchNails]

Mirror Matter and Anti-Mirror Matter too?

[BTGBullseye]

On 10/18/2018 at 8:11 PM, Im_CIA said:

>Bullseye

>Different avatar

So when is the Crystalline Entity coming to harvest this site, Mr. Lore?

Unfortunately I don't have a good still for the avatar loaded up on imgur yet, so I had to wait for the avatar size limits to change first. (it'll be back to Data shortly)